Delay Management including Capacities of Stations

The question of delay management is whether trains should wait for delayed feeder trains or should depart on time. Solutions to this problem strongly depend on the available capacity of the railway infrastructure. While the limited capacity of the tracks has been considered in delay management models, the limited capacity of the stations has been neglected so far. In this paper, we develop a model for the delay management problem that includes the stations’ capacities. This model allows to reschedule the platform assignment dynamically. Furthermore, we propose an iterative algorithm in which we first solve the delay management model with a fixed platform assignment and then improve this platform assignment in each step. We show that the latter problem can be solved in polynomial time by presenting a totally unimodular IP formulation. Finally, we present an extension of the model that balances the delay of the passengers on the one hand and the number of changes in the platform assignment on the other. All models are evaluated on real-world instances from Netherlands Railways.