Scope Restriction for Scalable Real-Time Railway Rescheduling: An
  Exploratory Study
Erik Nygren Christian Eichenberger Emma Frejinger
With the aim to stimulate future research, we describe an exploratory study
of a railway rescheduling problem. A widely used approach in practice and state
of the art is to decompose these complex problems by geographical scope.
Instead, we propose defining a core problem that restricts a rescheduling
problem in response to a disturbance to only trains that need to be
rescheduled, hence restricting the scope in both time and space. In this
context, the difficulty resides in defining a scoper that can predict a subset
of train services that will be affected by a given disturbance. We report
preliminary results using the Flatland simulation environment that highlights
the potential and challenges of this idea. We provide an extensible playground
open-source implementation based on the Flatland railway environment and
Answer-Set Programming.