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Davide Anguita, University of Genoa

Associate Professor
Train Delay Prediction System for Large-Scale Railway Networks
based on Big Data Analysis

Big Data Analysis for Railways is becoming increasingly relevant in all its different
possible applications. In this context, the goal of this paper is to apply Big Data
Analysis to a speci>c case study focused on increasing the automation level of
current train delay prediction systems, so to support TMS planning and dispatching
activities.

Nowadays, current train routes planning procedures are based only on the theoretical
values (e.g. time to cover the distance between stations, dwell times, and the like) to
generate trains timetables, without considering possible recurrent delay situations
that could be discovered by processing the historical data about train movements.

For example, data analysis can reveal that the same train usually arrives to a speci>c
station slightly in late (on average) every day, consequently providing the possibility
of updating the train trip scheduling to cope with that. Starting from this simple
example, it is possible to notice how Big Data analysis could be successfully used to
discover these kind of trends supporting the railway operators in the train trips
planning. From one side, this solution could have an impact on the perceived quality
 of service from the users point of view, and, on the other side, it could provide a
timetable that is less affected by recurrent delay causes.

Consequently, the automation increase in train delay prediction aims at improving the
current basic, albeit robust, methodologies [5]. This improvement has been achieved
by adopting the following three-steps approach:

1. Problem formalization: the problem has been addressed as a time series forecast
[6] [7] [8] [9], with the objective of predicting the delay of each train in all the
subsequent stations of interest, with the highest possible accuracy and with an
estimate of the forecasting accuracy itself.
2. Data collection: for this speci>c case study, the data has been provided by Rete
Ferroviaria Italiana (RFI) S.p.A., the Italian Infrastructure Manager (IM), which
owns an historical database containing all the information about train movements
for the entire Italian railway network. For future applications, this predictive
technology could be directly implemented by RFI, or by other IMs, on their own
information systems.
3. Data processing: the data has been analysed by using state-of-art Big Data
technologies, i.e. Apache Spark [12] on Apache Hadoop [13] [14], and by exploiting
a well-known Machine Learning
algorithm, the Extreme Learning Machines (ELMs) [10] [11], which has been
adapted to exploit typical Big Data parallel architectures.

The described approach and the prediction system performance has been validated
based on the real data provided by RFI, and through the comparison with the
performance achieved by the current train delay prediction system on the same data.
For this purpose, a set of novel KPIs agreed with the Infrastructure Manager has
been designed and used. Results show that this new train delay prediction system
can accurately predict the train delays, and that it is able to outperform current
prediction systems.

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