Assisting Passengers on Rerouted Train Service Using Vehicle Sharing System

Unexpected blockages of railway sections force trains that usually pass through them to change their route, affecting passengers whose boarding and alighting stations are skipped. In such cases, shared vehicles, whose stations are positioned around railway stations, could be used as an emergency transport option and mitigate the consequences of train rerouting. This paper provides an integer linear program for simultaneous routing of affected passengers and used shared vehicles. Our model assumes that the new train route is fixed, and provides a solution that minimizes the number of dropped passengers and total passenger travel time while keeping additional vehicles engagement as low as possible. Computational experiments are performed on realistic case studies over a part of the Swiss railway network. Behavior characteristics of the analyzed transportation system under low or high passenger demand are recognized and presented.