SIRE is a web-based real-time decision support tool for dispatchers in the Rail Control Center (RCC). It assesses the current locations and movement patterns of trains, factors in typical ridership patterns, and recommends actions dispatchers should take (e.g., holds, skips) to improve service to maximize the benefit to customers. With ridership near modern highs, New York City Transit’s (NYCT) subway network frequently operates at or near capacity. This makes maintaining a high-quality service both challenging, due to the lack of “slack,” and exceptionally important, due to the large number of riders affected by disruptions. To this end, train dispatchers constantly monitor the network and adjust service to respond to delays. This paper presents a decision support system developed by NYCT which uses real-time train movements and historical ridership information to provide dispatchers with recommendations for holds and station skips in real time. The system uses heuristic headway criteria to determine hold or skip candidate trains, and then estimates the net passenger time savings of each potential hold or skip using estimated origin–destination flows and basic assumptions about passenger behavior. Potential actions that meet a passenger benefit threshold are recommended, and communicated to dispatchers with a simple dashboard. A pilot implementation of the system has been in use at NYCT’s RCC for several months. Initial observations indicate the system is helping dispatchers manage train service more effectively, producing large passenger time savings.
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