A Timetable Rescheduling Approach for Heavy-haul Railways under Temporary Reduction of Section Capacity

Heavy-haul railways (HHRs) have the significant advantages of large volume, low cost, and high efficiency. However, trains may be subject to the temporary reduction of section capacity and deviate from the schedule due to adverse weather conditions, etc., which in turn affects the volume of freight. The dispatcher shall reschedule the timetable as soon as possible to restore the train operation order. Aiming to temporarily reduce section capacity scenarios, this paper adopts the hybrid strategy of retiming, reordering, and changing the stopping plan. Firstly, based on analyzing the influence factors of train headway, a calculation method of headway between different types of trains is introduced. Then a mixed-integer linear programming (MILP) model considering the constraints of the difference of train type and station capacity in HHRs is established. At the same time, to minimize the weighted sum of delay time and improve the solving efficiency, the two-stage solving algorithm is designed. Finally, the real route of Daqin Railway is taken as an example to verify the validity and feasibility of the proposed model and approach. The results show that the hybrid strategy can effectively reduce train delay under the temporary reduction of section capacity.