Considering a dynamic impact zone for real-time railway traffic management

The performance of this new Conflict Prevention Strategy is compared to a common dispatching strategy, other heuristics, and an exact method. Extensive experiments on a large part of the Belgian railway network show that by considering this dynamic impact zone the total delay can be decreased by at least 67% compared to the basic First Come, First Served decision rule. Moreover, the dynamic impact zone has a reasonable size and scales well to large networks as only the relevant conflicts and their expected consequences are considered. This makes our Dynamic Impact Zone heuristic very fast. The computation time for returning a resolution to a conflict with the proposed conflict prevention strategy is, for 95% of the conflicts, less than two seconds, and at most 26 s, including the creation of the dynamic impact zone of the conflict.