Rolling Stock Rescheduling in Case of Delays

In this paper, we introduce the Passenger Delay Reduction Problem. Here, we focus on rescheduling the rolling stock assignment in order to minimize the passenger delays that follow from an initial delay, while at the same time taking into account traditional cost objectives on passenger comfort and operational performance. We introduce two models to solve this problem, which are based on two models that are commonly used to solve the traditional rolling stock rescheduling problem. The first is based on a multi-commodity flow representation of the problem with side constraints, while the second is a Branch-and-Price approach that assigns sequences of trips to the individual train units. We test the effectiveness of these two models on real-life instances of Netherlands Railways (NS). The results show that the rescheduling of rolling stock can significantly decrease the passenger delays in the system, where especially the rescheduling of transitions at terminal stations turns out to be effective in reducing delays.