A real time traffic management model for regional railway networks under disturbances

We address real time traffic management under disturbances of regional rails with a centralized traffic control system. We solve the rescheduling problem by revisiting a finite time horizon mixed integer linear programming model from the related literature. First, we adapt the framework to regional networks, in which stations are close and the network is mainly constituted by single tracks; second, to solve train conflicts that may occur in the rescheduled timetable after the chosen time horizon, we enhance the model by an iterative heuristic algorithm that solves such conflicts. The presented approach is applied to a real data set related to a large portion of a regional network in Southern Italy, showing its effectiveness in providing a physically realizable rescheduled solution in a very short computational time.