Reallocating siding tracks in a railway station under severe disruptions

The arrangement of siding tracks in a station plays an important part in the station operation plan, especially when some trains are delayed. Due to speed limitation command by the dispatcher, trains are usually delayed getting into a station. When it occurs, the train may not reach its original siding track at its scheduled timetable and will have to be reallocated at a new time point, either to its original siding track or another. Then, the train‘s practical arrival time will further cause conflicts with other trains for occupying the same resources. Therefore, this paper focuses on the problem of station siding tracks reallocation after a delay, of which the first issue is to decide the siding tracks reallocated to delayed trains; the second one is to reschedule the arrival and departure time of trains passing through the station. A mixed-integer linear model is proposed to tackle the issue and real-world experiments based on Shijiazhuang (SJZ) high-speed railway passenger station are carried out to demonstrate the validity and efficiency of the model.