In the forthcoming decades railway transport is expected to face a significant growth of traffic flows which will mostly have to be accommodated over the existing infrastructures. An increase of capacity utilization is needed to avoid reduction of reliability and punctuality of transport services. Furthermore, energy efficient operations and multimodality opportunities are also topics of growing interest.

Intelligent railway operations management requires accurate modelling and simulation of train and pedestrian traffic flows and optimal management of key decisions at strategic, tactical, and operational levels. This special issue focuses on advanced mathematical modelling and optimal control in the railway domain and related multimodal transport networks. The aim is to identify new methods for improving the effectiveness and efficiency of railway operations, including the development of advanced techniques for timetabling, capacity management, infrastructure management, and traffic and passengers flow management.

This special issue is to select a compendium of high-quality research papers as well as review articles addressing recent theoretical and practical advances on railway operations management. We expect contributions that represent state-of-the-art approaches and breakthroughs in mathematical modeling, simulation, and particularly optimization to tackle railway operations management challenges. Submitted articles should be original and not yet published contributions or contributions that are not currently under review by any other journals.

Potential topics include but are not limited to the following:

• Advanced macroscopic, mesoscopic, and microscopic railway simulation
• Simulation-based optimization methods
• Improved railway accessibility and sustainability
• Intelligent railway operations control and integrated information systems
• Advanced traffic management in urban railway networks
• Train (re)scheduling, rolling stock, and crew management
• Energy-efficient train control approaches
• Railway traffic control and management
• Management of passenger flows in the era of big data
• Delay prediction techniques
• Improved estimation of traffic demand and capacity
• Multimodal traffic flow optimization
• Freight traffic management planning synchronization and scheduling
• Analysis and innovations to exploit the current and future signalling and ICT systems
• Integrated management of traffic flows and infrastructure elements
• Collaborative decision-making between different stakeholders
• Application of Operations Research techniques
• Application of Artificial Intelligence techniques