Online delay management in railways

Every day there are many people that travel by train. There are also many people that have a delay caused by this travelling. This delay can be a small delay of a few minutes or a big delay. A big delay can be caused when passengers miss their connecting train because of a small delay of the feeder train. To satisfy the passengers in the feeder train, the connecting train can wait for these passengers. But then the passengers in the connecting train are delayed and can miss their connecting train at another station. So the decision to be made for the connecting train is waiting for the delayed feeder train or departing on the scheduled time. This problem is known as delay management. In this thesis we will look at online delay management, this is useful in real life. Because in real life the delays are not known beforehand. For the online delay management we will use a simulation of a real life timetable and we will generate delays. With decision rules, we will use in the simulation, we can decide if a connecting train waits for a delayed feeder train or depart on the scheduled time. Finally, we evaluate the number of passengers that have a delay and the total delay of all passengers for the different decision rules.