Constraint-Based In-Station Train Dispatching

Andreas Schutt, Matteo Cardellini, Jip J. Dekker, Daniel Harabor, Marco Maratea, Mauro Vallati

Abstract: In-station dispatching is the problem of planning the movements of scheduled trains inside a railway station. Effective solutions for in-station dispatching are important for maximising the utilisation of railway infrastructure and for mitigating the impact of incidents and delays in the broader network. In this paper, we explore a constraint-based approach to perform in-station train dispatching. Our extensive empirical analysis of multiple modelling, search strategy, and solver choices, performed over synthetically generated, yet realistic, data, shows that our method outperforms the existing planning-based state-of-the-art approach. In addition, we present different optimisation criteria, which can be effortless defined thanks to the constraint-based approach.