Robust railway timetable for the Belgian Railways.

[Pieter Vansteenwegen]

For: Pieter Vansteenwegen

For 2012, the Belgian Railway Company (NMBS) will design a new railway timetable. NMBS wants the Centre for Industrial Management (CIB) to help them design a new and more robust timetable.

A few years ago, a CIB doctoral student developed a few timetabling principles and applied these to the whole Inter City (IC) network. Simulations have showed that the new IC timetable could reduce the passenger waiting time with 40% and the number of missed connections from 9 to 3%. At this moment, NMBS is trying to introduce these principles in the way they design the timetable.

This doctoral research should assist the NMBS in designing the new timetable for 2012 and making it more robust. During peak hours, many trains face small delays. However small, these delays could cause many passengers to miss their connection. NMBS wants to know how to deal with these small delays, when designing the timetable. A few principles are available from the previous research, but many questions and opportunities are still available.

• How to deal with the limited capacity of the “Noord-Zuid-As” in Brussels? The “Noord-Zuid-As” consists of only 6 tracks between the North and the South of Brussels with one intermediate station (Brussels-Central) and almost all trains in Belgium have to run through this “Noord-Zuid-As”. Furthermore, the smallest delay on the Noord-Zuid-As will cause bigger delays as soon as the train leaves Brussels. Therefore, many passengers risk missing their connection later on, during their trip.
• How to deal with limited capacity in different stations?
• How to take into account crew schedules and the availability of train material?
• Which problems can be solved by buffer times (or time supplements)? How to calculate ideal buffer times?

All required data about current delays of trains is available. A lot of know how is present in the CIB and NMBS is eager to support this research in all possible ways.