Integrated Dispatching in Railway Operations

• Applicant: Professor Dr.-Ing. Nils Nießen
• Subject Area: Traffic and Transport Systems, Intelligent and Automated Traffic
• Term: from 2018 to 2021
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 403435275

The forecast growth in rail transport over the next few years is a major challenge for railway infrastructure and operation. In particular, in heavily loaded railway nodes or subnetworks, the quality of scheduling decisions and the resulting delay propagation is essentially dependent on the experience and motivation of the dispatcher. A dispatching-prototype will be developed and validated by the transfer of knowledge project with the application partner VIA Consulting & Development GmbH in a pre-competitive area. This prototype of a decision support system calculates solution proposals with a proven quality for dispatching decisions.In the case of conflict resolution in the railway sector, novel methods cannot be taken directly into operations. Therefore, the additionally required validation step is carried out at the RWTH Aachen Railway Signalling Lab. In contrast to real operation, conflict scenarios are reproducible, which allows to evaluate different solution strategies. The results so far are very promising with respect to the computation time, but must also meet real requirements, since the time for dispatching decisions is limited more and more as time passes. In fact, not only the conflict resolution has to be done in real time, but potential conflicts must also be recognized reliably.The transfer of knowledge project is based on the DFG project " Optimierungsverfahren bei Disposition und Fahrplanerstellung im Eisenbahnwesen", which was successfully finished by Dr. rer. nat. Frédéric Weymann. The results obtained in the course of the project for automatic scheduling of train travels are to be tested at the Railway Signalling Lab with the application partner under realistic conditions and advanced in the direction of practicality.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants (Transfer Project)
• Application Partner: VIA Consulting & Development GmbH