Railway Networks

In this project we focus on the design and control of railway network operations, in particular the design of (robust) timetables and methods for online rescheduling.

Motivation

Railway traffic in Switzerland, as well as in many other countries, has increased considerably for both passenger and freight transportation during the last few years, and this trend is expected to continue. Construction of new tracks, though, is very expensive and hardly possible in many city centers. The capacity of the existing network must therefore be better utilised to meet the growing customer demand for more frequent transportation services.

Current Work

For offline planning, we follow a two-level approach based on two different abstraction levels of the infrastructure and safety system. On the macroscopic level, given a train service intention for the whole railway network, we abstract from the detailed track topology for creating a (flexible) timetable. On the microscopic level, starting with the flexible timetable from the macrosopic level, we construct detailed train schedules by considering the precise topology, the corresponding safety system as well as accurate train dynamics.

• Macroscopic timetabling: from the (partial) periodic service intention to a flexible timetable (new: including problem instances in XML / RailML)
• Microscopic scheduling: from a flexible timetable to a conflict-free schedule
• The interplay: description of the two-level approach

In real-time traffic management, our goal is to react to deviations by online rescheduling in order to always maintain a conflict-free schedule.

• Traffic Management: Models and algorithms for proactive rescheduling

Earlier Work

• Train routing in a station area with an independent set approach
• Capacity analysis of station areas using Petri Nets

Student Projects

It is possible to conduct a term, bachelor or diploma project on this topic. If you are interested or have questions, contact Martin Fuchsberger. An overview of completed term projects, Bachelor and Master theses can be found here.

Publications

See a list of our publications or access the recent PhD thesis of Gabrio Caimi via the ETH collection directly.

Contact Persons

• Martin Fuchsberger
• Dr. Marco Laumanns
• Kaspar Schüpbach
• Sabrina Wiedersheim

Former Collaborators

• Dr. Dan Burkolter
• Dr. Gabrio Caimi
• Dr. Fabian Chudak
• Dr. Thomas Herrmann
• Dr. Rico Zenklusen

External Collaborators

• Marco Lüthi and Prof. Dr. Ulrich Weidmann (IVT, ETH Zurich):
  Improving the Efficiency of Heavily Used Railway Networks - A systemwide Approach

Project Partner

• SBB Swiss Federal Railways, Infrastructure Division

Press release

• ETH Life, January 2008 (in German).