A simulation-based approach for estimating the commercial capacity of railways

Rail transport is expected to play a remarkable role for a sustainable mobility in Europe. This paper presents an approach for estimating the commercial capacity of railways. The commercial capacity is intended as the number of possible paths in a defined time window on a rail line, or part of it, considering a fixed path mix, with market-oriented quality. The capacity management is one of the most important tasks of railway Infrastructure Managers. The proposed simulation-based approach relies on the use of an optimizer and a simulator. The study has been developed for the rail line Verona-Brennero, located in the Italian part of the European Corridor Hamburg-Napoli. Computational results allowed to estimate the commercial capacity differences between the whole line and three important line sections within it. Other computational experiments showed the relevant estimated increase in commercial capacity that a reduction in time spacing between trains could imply.

[1]  Dario Pacciarelli,et al.  Job-shop scheduling with blocking and no-wait constraints , 2002, Eur. J. Oper. Res..

[2]  Xavier Gandibleux,et al.  Stability evaluation of a railway timetable at station level , 2009, Eur. J. Oper. Res..

[3]  Patrick T. Harker,et al.  Predicting on-time performance in scheduled railroad operations: methodology and application to train scheduling , 1998 .

[4]  Ello A.G. Weits.  Simulation of Railway Traffic Control , 1998 .

[5]  Hayriye Ayhan,et al.  A probabilistic (max, +) approach for determining railway infrastructure capacity , 2003, Eur. J. Oper. Res..

[6]  H. Krueger,et al.  Parametric modeling in rail capacity planning , 1999, WSC'99. 1999 Winter Simulation Conference Proceedings. 'Simulation - A Bridge to the Future' (Cat. No.99CH37038).

[7]  Alexander Verbraeck,et al.  Simulation Services to Support the Control Design of Rail Infrastructures , 2006, Proceedings of the 2006 Winter Simulation Conference.

[8]  Dick Middelkoop,et al.  Simone: Large scale train network simulations , 2001, Proceeding of the 2001 Winter Simulation Conference (Cat. No.01CH37304).

[9]  Giorgio Medeossi,et al.  Structure and Simulation Evaluation of an Integrated Real-Time Rescheduling System for Railway Networks , 2009 .

[10]  Ali Azadeh,et al.  Integration of DEA and AHP with computer simulation for railway system improvement and optimization , 2008, Appl. Math. Comput..

[11]  Ferenc Szidarovszky,et al.  A multi-objective train scheduling model and solution , 2004 .

[12]  Miguel A. Salido,et al.  An Assessment of Railway Capacity , 2008 .

[13]  J. Will M. Bertrand,et al.  AN AGGREGATE CAPACITY ESTIMATION MODEL FOR THE EVALUATION OF RAILROAD PASSING CONSTRUCTIONS , 2000 .

[14]  Dario Pacciarelli,et al.  Assessment of flexible timetables in real-time traffic management of a railway bottleneck , 2008 .

[15]  M. J Dorfman,et al.  Scheduling trains on a railway network using a discrete event model of railway traffic , 2004 .

[16]  Fred W. Glover,et al.  New advances and applications for marrying simulation and optimization , 2004, Proceedings of the 2004 Winter Simulation Conference, 2004..

[17]  Paolo Toth,et al.  A Lagrangian heuristic algorithm for a real-world train timetabling problem , 2006, Discret. Appl. Math..