Real-time traffic management in railway aims to minimize delays after an unexpected event perturbs the operations. It can be formalized as the real-time railway traffic management problem, which seeks for the best train routing and scheduling in case of perturbation, in a given time horizon. We propose a mixed-integer linear programming formulation for tackling this problem, representing the infrastructure with fine granularity. This is seldom done in the literature, unless stringent artificial constraints are imposed for reducing the size of the search space. In a thorough experimental analysis, we assess the impact of the granularity of the representation of the infrastructure on the optimal solution. We tackle randomly generated instances representing traffic in the control area named triangle of Gagny, and instances obtained from the real timetable of the control area including the Lille-Flandres station (both in France) and we consider multiple perturbation scenarios. In these experiments, the negative impact of a rough granularity on the delay suffered by trains is remarkable and statistically significant.

The real-time railway traffic management problem consists of selecting appropriate train routes and schedules for minimizing the propagation of delay in case of traffic perturbation. In this paper, we tackle this problem by introducing RECIFE-MILP, a heuristic algorithm based on a mixed-integer linear programming model. RECIFE-MILP uses a model that extends one we previously proposed by including additional elements characterizing railway reality. In addition, it implements performance boosting methods selected among several ones through an algorithm configuration tool. We present a thorough experimental analysis that shows that the performances of RECIFE-MILP are better than the ones of the currently implemented traffic management strategy. RECIFE-MILP often finds the optimal solution to instances within the short computation time available in real-time applications. Moreover, RECIFE-MILP is robust to its configuration if an appropriate selection of the combination of boosting methods is performed.

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