18th Euro Working Group on Transportation, EWGT 2015, 14-16 July 2015, Delft, The Netherlands Practical Macroscopic Evaluation and Comparison of Railway Timetables

AbstractFrom the perspective of passengers, a railway timetable can be called better than another if its expected passenger time is lowerin practice. So, we constructed an analytical function that evaluates a timetable on this criterion: total expected passenger timein practice. Other methods to evaluate timetables invariably describe di erent performance indicators: realisability, conflict-freeness, stability, eciency, robustness, resilience, but mostly do not indicate how to score and weigh these di erent performanceindicators. This means that when comparing two timetables, deciding which one is preferable remains hard. Our objective ofexpected passenger time in practice resolves these issues.Also, compared to a simulation approach, our analytical stochastic approach has a major practical advantage. It decouples allactions (ride, dwell, transfer, knock-on) in the timetable and in doing so, can evaluate the expected time in every action separatelyand simply add all expected times of composing actions afterwards. So the exponential amount of combinations of primary delaysover all actions that standard simulation packages explicitly iterate over is dealt with implicitly and much more eciently. Thismakes that the evaluation made by our method requires less time.Our method is applied to two timetables of all passenger trains in Belgium. Both timetables were manually planned and then putinto operation in practice. With our method, we can conclude that one timetable has considerably lower total expected passengertime in practice than the other one. We also show that this is caused mainly by better passenger transfer planning, but also partly bya changed line planning. Comparison of the reported results for both timetables also suggests that advantages of each could maybebe combined.c 2015 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B. V.Selection and peer-review under responsibility of Delft University of Technology.Keywords: