Reinforcement Learning in Railway Timetable Rescheduling

Real-time railway traffic management is important for the daily operations of railway systems. It predicts and resolves operational conflicts caused by events like excessive passenger boardings/alightings. Traditional optimization methods for this problem are restricted by the size of the problem instances. Therefore, this paper proposes a reinforcement learning-based timetable rescheduling method. Our method learns how to reschedule a timetable off-line and then can be applied online to make an optimal dispatching decision immediately by sensing the current state of the railway environment. Experiments show that the rescheduling solution obtained by the proposed reinforcement learning method is affected by the state representation of the railway environment. The proposed method was tested to a part of the Dutch railways considering scenarios with single initial train delays and multiple initial train delays. In both cases, our method found high-quality rescheduling solutions within limited training episodes.