Robustness in Swedish Railway Traffic Timetables

• A tendency seen for quite some time in the Swedish railway network is a growing demand for capacity which no longer can be accommodated. This causes congestion and delays, and the relationships between the trains and how they affect eachother are significantly harder to overview and analyse. Railway traffic timetables normally contain margins to make them robust, and enable trains to recover from certain delays. How effective these margins are, depends on their size and location as well as the frequency and magnitude of the disturbances that occur. Hence, it is important to include marigns so, that they can be used operationally to recover from a variety of disturbances and not restricted to a specific part of the line and/or the timetable. In a case study we compare the performance of a selection of passenger train services to the different prerequisites given by the timetable (e.g. available margins and their location, critical train dependencies). The study focuses on the Swedish Southern mainline between Stockholm and Malmö on which a wide variety of train services operate, e.g. freight trains, local and regional commuter train services as well as long-distance trains with different speed profiles. The analysis shows a clear mismatch between where margins are placed and where delays occur. We also believe that the most widely used performance measure, which is related to the delay when arriving at the final destination, might give rise to an unnecessarily high delay rate at intermediate stations.

Subject headings

TEKNIK OCH TEKNOLOGIER  -- Samhällsbyggnadsteknik -- Transportteknik och logistik (hsv//swe)

ENGINEERING AND TECHNOLOGY  -- Civil Engineering -- Transport Systems and Logistics (hsv//eng)

Keyword

Railway traffic

Scheduling

Robustness

Delay management.

Publication and Content Type

vet (subject category)

kon (subject category)