Design of Customer-oriented Dispatching Support for Railways
Traditionally, dispatching strategies in railways mainly concentrate on maintaining timeliness of trains and ensuring passenger connections. Although customer-orientation is getting more and more important today, little is explicitly known about the effec
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Abstract. Traditionally, dispatehing strategies in railways mainly concentrate on maintaining timeliness of trains and ensuring passenger connections. Although customer-orientation is getting more and more important today, little is explicitly known ab out the effects of various dispatehing strategies into customer satisfaction. In this paper, we discuss the design of dispatehing support systems for railway passenger traffic from the viewpoint of pass enger orientation. We have implemented simulation and optimization based tools and validated t hem using extensive data from German Rail . We report on three systems: A coars e simulator based on global waiting time rules , a detailed agent-based simulator, and an exact optimization system. The system environment can be used offline, and partially online as well, to test and evaluate dispatehing strategies. The focus of the paper is on the system design and its validation for the purposes of railway dispatching. The numerical results are still preliminary and have to be extended in sub sequent studies.
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Customer-oriented Dispatehing
In many countries, railways are currently in the pro cess of becoming privatized and operating in competition with other railway companies as weIl as with other modes of trafiic. Although it has always been important to provide good service to customers, this becomes a central issue in the increasingly competitive situation. Customer acceptance is positively influenced by providing high quality trips and passen ger connections, but negatively influenced by delays and missed connections at operations. Because scheduled traffic is always subject to external factors, many types of disturbances cannot be avoided which make short-term changes to a given schedule necessary. When a disturbance such as a technical defect , accumulated vehicle lat eness, missing crew members , or congestion, occurs, a dispateher has to react within a few minutes, and decide about changes in the schedule, such as delaying connecting trains and reaIlo cating resources (vehicles and crews) . In railway trafiic it often takes several days to reconstruct the planned schedule or a consistent one after ad hoc changes . S. Voß et al. (eds.), Computer-Aided Scheduling of Public Transport © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2001
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Suhl, Biederbick, and Kliewer
Although customer orientation is getting more and more important, little is known about how to reliably measure customer satisfaction in railways and how to design dispatehing strategies that maximize customer satisfaction. There are several established simulation tools available for railway traffic (see, e.g., Siefer and Hauptmann (2001)), however , they are usually technologyoriented aiming at optimal dispatehing of trains and other equipment. In this paper, we report on our activities in simulating railway traffic in a complex network, in order to test various dispatehing strategies to maximize customer satisfaction. We present decision support tools which can be used to derive and evaluate explicit dispat
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