Reallocating siding tracks in a railway station under severe disruptions

The arrangement of siding tracks in a station plays an important part in the station operation plan, especially when some trains are delayed. Due to speed limitation command by the dispatcher, trains are usually delayed getting into a station. When it occurs, the train may not reach its original siding track at its scheduled timetable and will have to be reallocated at a new time point, either to its original siding track or another. Then, the train`s practical arrival time will further cause conflicts with other trains for occupying the same resources. Therefore, this paper focuses on the problem of station siding tracks reallocation after a delay, of which the first issue is to decide the siding tracks reallocated to delayed trains; the second one is to reschedule the arrival and departure time of trains passing through the station. A mixed-integer linear model is proposed to tackle the issue and real-world experiments based on Shijiazhuang (SJZ) high-speed railway passenger station are carried out to demonstrate the validity and efficiency of the model.