Boosting the performance of railway traffic management through the reformulation of RECIFE-MILP

In this paper we propose a reformulation of RECIFE-MILP aimed at boosting the algorithm performance. RECIFE-MILP is a mixed integer linear programming based heuristic for the real-time railway traffic management problem, that is, the problem of re-routing and rescheduling trains in case of perturbation in order to minimize the delay propagation. The reformulation which we propose exploits the topology of the railway infrastructure. Specifically, it capitalizes on the implicit relations between routing and scheduling decisions to reduce the number of binary variables of the formulation. In an experimental analysis based on realistic instances representing traffic in the French Pierfitte-Gonesse junction, we show the performance improvement achievable through the reformulation.