Stochastic Model-Based Analysis of Railway Operation to Support Traffic Planning

Thepossibilitytoanalyzethecapacityofrailwaylinesthrough the study of travel time and delays of the trains, appears to be a useful means to investigate critical situations that affect quality of service in railway systems, but can have side effects on the overall safety as well. In order to satisfy the required levels of the transport service, the capacity may be verified and estimated with good approximation by railway op- eration simulation models that should be easily applied on every railway plant. This work describes an approach that generates automatically a stochastic model used for railway operation simulation. This model takes in input information about the railway topology and the required service. It reproduces the operation of the elementary devices compos- ing the railway system using the Stochastic Activity Networks (SAN) formalism and the C++ programming language. The model may be ap- plied in railway traffic studies as support for timetable improvements for delay minimization and for planning infrastructural upgrades