With the aim to stimulate future research, we describe an exploratory study of a railway rescheduling problem. A widely used approach in practice and state of the art is to decompose these complex problems by geographical scope. Instead, we propose defining a core problem that restricts a rescheduling problem in response to a disturbance to only trains that need to be rescheduled, hence restricting the scope in both time and space. In this context, the difficulty resides in defining a scoper that can predict a subset of train services that will be affected by a given disturbance. We report preliminary results using the Flatland simulation environment that highlights the potential and challenges of this idea. We provide an extensible playground open-source implementation based on the Flatland railway environment and Answer-Set Programming.
@article{arxiv.2305.03574,
title = {Scope Restriction for Scalable Real-Time Railway Rescheduling: An Exploratory Study},
author = {Erik Nygren and Christian Eichenberger and Emma Frejinger},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2305.03574},
year = {2023}
}