Resilience assessment of railway networks: Combining infrastructure restoration and transport management

During railways operations, unplanned events might occur which can result in rail traffic being heavily impacted. The paper proposes a passenger-centred resilience assessment for disruption scenarios which consist of multiple simultaneous disruptions. It combines train traffic operations, passenger flows and network restoration. To evaluate resilience, an optimization-based approach has been developed for solving the new infrastructure restoration and transport management (IRTM) problem. Additionally, this approach develops mitigation plans for the best infrastructure restoration and traffic recovery and it captures the time-dependent transport network performance during disruptions. The approach is general with respect to types of disruptions, and can be applied for evaluation against short disruptions (1–2 h) as well as more substantial ones (multiple days or weeks). The performance of the proposed approach has been demonstrated on a Dutch railway network. Furthermore, the resilience of the system is assessed against the critical infrastructure disruption scenarios in the network. This optimization-based approach shall enable decision makers to quantify accurately impacts of multiple disruptions by considering the created inconveniences to passengers in the railway operation due to these disruptions.