Microscopic Simulation of Railway Operation for Developing Integrated Timetables

OpenTrack is a user-friendly railroad network simulation program developed at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology’s Institute for Transportation Planning and Systems (ETH IVT). It is a microscopic model that simulates rail system operations based on user defined train, infrastructure, and timetable databases. OpenTrack functions as a railroad laboratory, by, for example, allowing users to define incidents and take infrastructure out of service to evaluate alternative scenarios. The program uses a mixed discrete/continuous simulation process that calculates both the continuous solution of train motion equations and the discrete processes of signal box states and delay distributions. It generates a wide variety data that can be easily presented in many formats including graphs (e.g. time-space diagrams), tables, and images. OpenTrack’s main uses have been to evaluate and test infrastructure plans and operating schedules to optimize network and timetable design. It can be run on several different computer platforms and incorporates the benefits of object oriented programming language with a common data interface structure.