Francesco Corman, Disruption Management in Railway Networks
A major problem of public transport, and railways in particular, is to improve quality of operations by updating an offline timetable to the ever-changing delays situation, in order to improve performance of the transport system. In railway systems, this relates to reducing train delays by reordering, retiming, or rerouting trains, and/or change connection plans and route advised to passengers, to improve their travel time. The key point of this research is the interaction between the problem (of the infrastructure manager) to reschedule trains, and the problem (of the travelers) to find the optimal route in the network. In fact, changing passenger flows, respectively delaying trains and/or dropping passenger connections, varies the setting under which the two decision makers respectively interact. The interaction of the two decisions makers is mediated by the information one decision maker has about the other, and the service which is offered/used. We report different methods to address this dilemma, by agent based simulations, by game-theoretical approaches, and by estimating models of human behavior based on observed actions.
Dr. Francesco Corman, chair of Transport Systems at the Institute of Transport Planning and Systems, Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, ETH Zurich, presents a seminar at C2SMART on “Disruption Management in Railway Networks.” Dr. Corman holds the chair of Transport Systems at the Institute of Transport Planning and Systems, Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, ETH Zurich, Switzerland. He has a Ph.D. in Transport Sciences from TUDelft, the Netherlands, on operations research techniques for realtime railway traffic control. He has academic experience at KU Leuven, Belgium and TUDelft as research associate in transportation and logistics. Main research interests are in the application of quantitative methods and operations research to transport sciences, especially on the operational perspective, public transport, railways and logistics.