Trains scheduling is an important problem in railway transportation. Many companies use fixed train timetabling to handle this problem. Train delays can affect the pre-defined timetables and postpone destination arrival times. Besides, delay propagation may affect other trains and degrade the performance of a railway network. An optimal timetable minimizes the total propagated delays in a network. In this paper, we propose a new approach to compute the expected propagated delays in a railway network. As the main contribution of the work, we use Discrete-time Markov chains to model a railway network with a fixed timetable and use probabilistic model checking to approximate the expected delays and the probability of reaching destinations with a desired delay. We use PRISM model checker to apply our approach for analyzing the impact of different train scheduling in double line tracks.
Probabilistic Model Checking and Non-standard Multi-objective Reasoning
