Train Control to Reduce Delays upon Service Disturbances at Railway Junctions

Train delay is one of the most important indexes to evaluate the service quality of the railway. Because of interactions among different trains, a delayed train may hinder subsequent trains scheduled on other lines at junction area. Trains may be forced to stop or decelerate, which consequently leads to the loss of run-time. This paper proposes a time-saving control method to recover the train delay as much as possible. In the proposed method, golden section search is adopted to identify the optimal train speed at the time of signal upgrade in the conflicting area, which enables the train to depart from the conflicting area as soon as possible. A heuristic method is then developed to attain the train control scheme to realize the optimal train speed at the time of signal upgrade in the conflicting area. Simulation study indicates that the proposed method enables the train to across the conflicting area with smaller run-time and therefore leads to larger delay reduction, in comparison with the traditional maximum speed control method and the green wave control method.