A Heuristic Technique for the Capacity Assessment of Periodic Trains

Railway capacity has been a significant issue in the railway industry. Numerous approaches and tools have been developed to compute railway capacity. Nowadays, due to the European politics of liberation of the railway, numerous railway companies need to realize capacity studies to improve their networks. In this paper, we present a fractional heuristic technique to compute the maximum railway capacity to schedule periodic trains, developed in collaboration with the Spanish Railway Infrastructure Manager (ADIF). This technique studies the capacity of every line section considering its adjacent line sections. The results show that this technique obtain saturated running map.