Improving passenger robustness by taking passenger numbers and recurring delays explicitly into account on the tactical level

In this paper, we consider nearly saturated station areas whose limited capacity is one of the main reasons of delay propagation. Our goal is to improve, during the planning phase, the total travel time in practice of all passengers in the railway network. Therefore, passenger numbers and recurring delays of trains are explicitly taken into account in the optimization process. By maximizing the (passenger- and/or delay-) weighted spreading between trains in a fixed time window, potential conflicts that affect many passengers are avoided which is beneficial for the total real travel time of all passengers. Using our approach, the passenger robustness of Brussels, Belgium’s main railway bottleneck, can be improved by 11%.