Usefulness of off-line delay management

Every day, all over the world, some people get delays when they travel by train. A delay of a few minutes is often no problem, but big delays are really annoying. A big delay can be caused when passengers change trains and miss a connecting train, because of a small delay of the feeder train. The connecting train could wait for the delayed train and give the passengers the opportunity to change trains as planned. However, the connecting train now also has a delay. The problem we are dealing with here is called delay management. In this thesis we will check whether off-line delay management might be useful in real life. We will use a simulation of a real life timetable and generate delays. We make the ‘waiting’ decisions with an off-line delay management model for the next hour of the timetable each time a delay occurs. Finally, we evaluate the total delay passengers have.