delay propagation
Deep Learning to Identify the Spatio-Temporal Cascading Effects of Train Delays in a High-Density Network
The operational efficiency of railway networks, a cornerstone of modern economies, is persistently undermined by the cascading effects of train delays. Accurately forecasting this delay propagation is a critical challenge for real-time traffic management. While recent research has leveraged Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) to model the network structure of railways, a significant gap remains in developing frameworks that provide multi-step autoregressive forecasts at a network-wide scale, while simultaneously offering the live, interpretable explanations needed for decision support. This paper addresses this gap by developing and evaluating a novel XGeoAI framework for live, explainable, multi-step train delay forecasting. The core of this work is a two-stage, autoregressive Graph Attention Network (GAT) model, trained on a real-world dataset covering over 40% of the Dutch railway network. The model represents the system as a spatio-temporal graph of operational events (arrivals and departures) and is enriched with granular features, including platform and station congestion. To test its viability for live deployment, the model is rigorously evaluated using a sequential, k-step-ahead forecasting protocol that simulates real-world conditions where prediction errors can compound. The results demonstrate that while the proposed GATv2 model is challenged on pure error metrics (MAE) by a simpler Persistence baseline, it achieves consistently higher precision in classifying delay events -- a crucial advantage for a reliable decision support tool.
RSTGCN: Railway-centric Spatio-Temporal Graph Convolutional Network for Train Delay Prediction
Chowdhury, Koyena, Koley, Paramita, Chakraborty, Abhijnan, Ghosh, Saptarshi
Accurate prediction of train delays is critical for efficient railway operations, enabling better scheduling and dispatching decisions. While earlier approaches have largely focused on forecasting the exact delays of individual trains, recent studies have begun exploring station-level delay prediction to support higher-level traffic management. In this paper, we propose the Railway-centric Spatio-Temporal Graph Convolutional Network (RSTGCN), designed to forecast average arrival delays of all the incoming trains at railway stations for a particular time period. Our approach incorporates several architectural innovations and novel feature integrations, including train frequency-aware spatial attention, which significantly enhances predictive performance. To support this effort, we curate and release a comprehensive dataset for the entire Indian Railway Network (IRN), spanning 4,735 stations across 17 zones - the largest and most diverse railway network studied to date. We conduct extensive experiments using multiple state-of-the-art baselines, demonstrating consistent improvements across standard metrics. Our work not only advances the modeling of average delay prediction in large-scale rail networks but also provides an open dataset to encourage further research in this critical domain.
Queue up for takeoff: a transferable deep learning framework for flight delay prediction
Aghanya, Nnamdi Daniel, Vu, Ta Duong, Diop, Amaëlle, Deville, Charlotte, Kerroumi, Nour Imane, Moulitsas, Irene, Li, Jun, Bisandu, Desmond
Flight delays are a significant challenge in the aviation industry, causing major financial and operational disruptions. To improve passenger experience and reduce revenue loss, flight delay prediction models must be both precise and generalizable across different networks. This paper introduces a novel approach that combines Queue-Theory with a simple attention model, referred to as the Queue-Theory SimAM (QT-SimAM). To validate our model, we used data from the US Bureau of Transportation Statistics, where our proposed QT-SimAM (Bidirectional) model outperformed existing methods with an accuracy of 0.927 and an F1 score of 0.932. To assess transferability, we tested the model on the EUROCONTROL dataset. The results demonstrated strong performance, achieving an accuracy of 0.826 and an F1 score of 0.791. Ultimately, this paper outlines an effective, end-to-end methodology for predicting flight delays. The proposed model's ability to forecast delays with high accuracy across different networks can help reduce passenger anxiety and improve operational decision-making
DOMAC: Differentiable Optimization for High-Speed Multipliers and Multiply-Accumulators
Xue, Chenhao, Ren, Yi, Zhou, Jinwei, Li, Kezhi, Zhang, Chen, Lin, Yibo, Zhang, Lining, Xu, Qiang, Sun, Guangyu
Multipliers and multiply-accumulators (MACs) are fundamental building blocks for compute-intensive applications such as artificial intelligence. With the diminishing returns of Moore's Law, optimizing multiplier performance now necessitates process-aware architectural innovations rather than relying solely on technology scaling. In this paper, we introduce DOMAC, a novel approach that employs differentiable optimization for designing multipliers and MACs at specific technology nodes. DOMAC establishes an analogy between optimizing multi-staged parallel compressor trees and training deep neural networks. Building on this insight, DOMAC reformulates the discrete optimization challenge into a continuous problem by incorporating differentiable timing and area objectives. This formulation enables us to utilize existing deep learning toolkit for highly efficient implementation of the differentiable solver. Experimental results demonstrate that DOMAC achieves significant enhancements in both performance and area efficiency compared to state-of-the-art baselines and commercial IPs in multiplier and MAC designs.
Transformers \`a Grande Vitesse
Arthaud, Farid, Lecoeur, Guillaume, Pierre, Alban
Robust travel time predictions are of prime importance in managing any transportation infrastructure, and particularly in rail networks where they have major impacts both on traffic regulation and passenger satisfaction. We aim at predicting the travel time of trains on rail sections at the scale of an entire rail network in real-time, by estimating trains' delays relative to a theoretical circulation plan. Predicting the evolution of a given train's delay is a uniquely hard problem, distinct from mainstream road traffic forecasting problems, since it involves several hard-to-model phenomena: train spacing, station congestion and heterogeneous rolling stock among others. We first offer empirical evidence of the previously unexplored phenomenon of delay propagation at the scale of a railway network, leading to delays being amplified by interactions between trains and the network's physical limitations. We then contribute a novel technique using the transformer architecture and pre-trained embeddings to make real-time massively parallel predictions for train delays at the scale of the whole rail network (over 3000 trains at peak hours, making predictions at an average horizon of 70 minutes). Our approach yields very positive results on real-world data when compared to currently-used and experimental prediction techniques.
Spatiotemporal Propagation Learning for Network-Wide Flight Delay Prediction
Wu, Yuankai, Yang, Hongyu, Lin, Yi, Liu, Hong
Demystifying the delay propagation mechanisms among multiple airports is fundamental to precise and interpretable delay prediction, which is crucial during decision-making for all aviation industry stakeholders. The principal challenge lies in effectively leveraging the spatiotemporal dependencies and exogenous factors related to the delay propagation. However, previous works only consider limited spatiotemporal patterns with few factors. To promote more comprehensive propagation modeling for delay prediction, we propose SpatioTemporal Propagation Network (STPN), a space-time separable graph convolutional network, which is novel in spatiotemporal dependency capturing. From the aspect of spatial relation modeling, we propose a multi-graph convolution model considering both geographic proximity and airline schedule. From the aspect of temporal dependency capturing, we propose a multi-head self-attentional mechanism that can be learned end-to-end and explicitly reason multiple kinds of temporal dependency of delay time series. We show that the joint spatial and temporal learning models yield a sum of the Kronecker product, which factors the spatiotemporal dependence into the sum of several spatial and temporal adjacency matrices. By this means, STPN allows cross-talk of spatial and temporal factors for modeling delay propagation. Furthermore, a squeeze and excitation module is added to each layer of STPN to boost meaningful spatiotemporal features. To this end, we apply STPN to multi-step ahead arrival and departure delay prediction in large-scale airport networks. To validate the effectiveness of our model, we experiment with two real-world delay datasets, including U.S and China flight delays; and we show that STPN outperforms state-of-the-art methods. In addition, counterfactuals produced by STPN show that it learns explainable delay propagation patterns.