Tamme Emunds: Calculating the capacity of railway systems considering microscopic infrastructure constraints

 

With rising demand on public transportation due to political and environmental influences, railway transportation is subject to rising requirements on quality, quantity and efficiency of the used infrastructure. To fulfill those enhanced needs, infrastructure managers are required to identify bottlenecks in existing infrastructure and precisely estimate the capacity of newly constructed or extended infrastructure. In many cases the stations turn out to be the bottleneck in the railway network.

Developing methods for the analyzation of railway infrastructure capacity has therefore been one of the major suspects of interest to railway researchers. While sufficient methods for the estimation of railway lines have already been developed and heavily used for planning purposes, the capacity analysis of entire railway stations remains a challenging research question.

In this project, new methods for quantifying the capacity of railway stations will be developed and analyzed. The primary focus will be laid on the development of efficient algorithms to estimate the theoretical capacity of railway infrastructure in stations. Further, methodologies to quantify the influence of disturbances from multiple sources – in example technical failures, maintenance work or peaks in the transported traffic volume – to the infrastructure capacity will be developed and analyzed.