Delay Management with Rerouting of Passengers

The question of delay management (DM) is whether trains should wait for a delayed feeder train or should depart on time. In classical DM models, passengers are assumed to take their originally planned routes. After the wait‐depart decisions are made, passengers will certainly change to the best‐possible route according to these decisions. In this paper, we propose a model where such a rerouting of passengers is incorporated in the DM process. To describe the problem, we represent it as an event‐activity network similar to the one used in classical DM, with some additional events to incorporate origin and destination of the passengers. We present an integer programming formulation of this problem. Furthermore, we discuss the variant in which we assume fixed costs for maintaining connections, and we present a polynomial algorithm for the special case of only one origin‐destination pair that we later use to derive a strong lower bound for the integer program. Finally, computational experiments based on real‐world data from Netherlands Railways show that significant improvements with respect to the passengers' traveling times can be obtained by taking the rerouting of passengers into account in the model.