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The Ring Never Relieves
(2021)
Regarding the disposition of metro lines in order to recover from delays, in the literature there can be found two branches of contributions: On the one hand, there are descriptions of response rules such as expressing (also referred to as skip stop), holding and short-turning together with studies in what situation to apply which of them. On the other hand, there are fully-automated optimization models which make use of any possible driving and routing options, according to some specified objective function.
To the best of our knowledge, we are not aware of any study that puts its focus specifically on ring lines (also known as circle or loop lines). Yet, in the absence in particular of more or less 'natural' time buffers in turnaround activities in the endpoints, the operation of a circle line is particularly challenging.
In this spirit, we are collecting response rules that are applicable especially for circle lines. We sketch their impacts on the passengers’ travel experience as well as on the resource schedules for the rolling stock and staff (train drivers). For selected response rules, we provide illustrative drawings.
Moreover, we present the answers that experts of eleven metro networks that are operating circle lines were pointing to us during interviews. It turns out that despite the limited possibilities along circle lines there is a broad repertoire of response action that is taken on a regular basis – but also that some standard general response rule (expressing) is almost never applied in practice.