An Offline Timetable Scheduling Technique for Railways Service Level Optimization: A Case Study

This paper modifies and extends an existing model in the relevant literature on cyclic railway timetabling. The periodic model is applied to the real case of a southern Italy regional railway network, managed by Ferrovie del Sud-Est. Their network is mainly constituted by single tracks with only few double track segments; in addition, in some stations, only one train can stop or pass through: this makes the train timetable problem quite complex to solve. Therefore, the cyclic railway timetabling problem proposed in the literature is modified in order to model such peculiarities of the considered case study. The obtained periodic timetabling is compared with the previous acyclic timetabling currently available in the railway network, in order to highlight the benefits in service levels deriving by the adoption of the new timetable.