Artificial Intelligence Applied on Traffic Planning and Management for Rail Transport: A Review and Perspective

Artificial intelligence (AI) has received much attention in the domain of railway traffic planning and management (TPM) from academia and industries. While many promising applications have been reported, there remains a lack of detailed review of the many AI models/algorithms and their uses and adaptations in rail TPM. To fill this gap, this systematic literature review conducts, reports, and synthesizes the state-of-the-art of AI applied in railway TPM from four perspectives, i.e., the intersection between AI research fields (e.g., expert systems, data mining, and adversarial search) and rail TPM, the intersection between AI techniques (e.g., evolutionary computing and machine learning) and rail TPM, the intersection between AI applications (e.g., operations research, scheduling, and planning) and rail TPM, and the intersection between AI related disciplines (e.g., big data analytics and digital twins) and rail TPM. The study evaluates 95 research papers published during 1970–2022. Accordingly, a comprehensive synthesis of each intersection between AI and rail TPM is presented, and the practical roadmap for application of AI in rail TPM is proposed. Furthermore, the study identifies the research gaps and areas that need more investigation. The contribution helps researchers and practitioners to get a better understanding of the status quo of research stream, research development trends, and challenges for further related study.