In order to face the expected growth of transport demand in the next years, several new traffic control policies have been proposed and analyzed both to generate timetables and to effectively manage the traffic in real-time. In this paper, a detailed optimization model is used to analyze one such policy, called green wave, which consists in letting trains wait at thestations to avoid speed profile modifications in open corridors. Such policy is expected to be especially effective when the corridors are the bottleneck of the network. However, there is a lack of quantitative studies onthe real-time effects of using this policy. To this end, this work shows a comparison of the delays obtained when trains are allowed or not to change their speed profile in open corridors. An extensive computational studyis described for two practical dispatching areas of the Dutch railway network. (A) Reprinted with permission from Elsevier.
Abstract