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A short-turning policy for the management of demand disruptions in rapid transit systems

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Abstract

Rapid transit systems timetables are commonly designed to accommodate passenger demand in sections with the highest passenger load. However, disruptions frequently arise due to an increase in the demand, infrastructure incidences or as a consequence of fleet size reductions. All these circumstances give rise to unsupplied demand at certain stations, which generates passenger overloads in the available vehicles. The design of strategies that guarantee reasonable user waiting time with small increases of operation costs is now an important research topic. This paper proposes a tactical approach to determine optimal policies for dealing with such situations. Concretely, a short-turning strategy is analysed, where some vehicles perform short cycles in order to increase the frequency among certain stations of the lines and to equilibrate the train occupancy level. Turn-back points should be located and service offset should be determined with the objective of diminishing the passenger waiting time while preserving certain level of quality of service. Computational results and analysis for a real case study are provided.

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Acknowledgments

This research work was partially supported by the Excellence program of the Andalusian Government, under grant P09-TEP-5022, and by the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC) under grant 39682-10. We are also grateful to RENFE (Madrid commuter railway system operator) for providing data and information relevant to the calibration of the model. Thanks are due to the referees for their valuable comments.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Industrial Engineering and Management Science I, School of Engineering, University of Seville, Av. de los Descubrimientos s/n, 41092 , Seville, Spain

    David Canca

  2. Interuniversity Research Center on Network Enterprise, Logistics and Transportation (CIRRELT) and HEC Montréal, 3000 chemin de la Côte-Sainte-Catherine , Montréal, QC , H3T 2A7 , Canada

    Eva Barrena & Gilbert Laporte

  3. Department of Applied Mathematics I, School of Architecture, University of Seville, Av. Reina Mercedes 2, 41012 , Seville, Spain

    Francisco A. Ortega

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  1. David Canca
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Correspondence to Francisco A. Ortega.

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Canca, D., Barrena, E., Laporte, G. et al. A short-turning policy for the management of demand disruptions in rapid transit systems. Ann Oper Res 246, 145–166 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10479-014-1663-x

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