Reliable timetable design for railways and connecting public transport services

Models for Predictive Railway Traffic Management

The potential growth in transport demand in the next decade and beyond requires a change from reactive to proactive traffic control to maintain and improve the reliability of railway traffic. In order to enable an anticipative approach to traffic management, it is necessary to develop the tools for monitoring, prediction and optimisation of the...

Turborotonde en turboplein: Ontwerp, capaciteit en veiligheid

Historical Context The idea to install one-way circulatory traffic management on intersections was struck around 1900, both in the USA and Europe. The devisers regarded the principle of merging and weaving essential for the rotary system and, in practice, right of way had not yet been regulated unambiguously. This resulted in traffic circles...

Real-time Railway Traffic Management: Dispatching in complex, large and busy railway networks

Railway is an important and sustainable transportation mode, which despite good potentials results in a limited attractiveness, mostly due to the perceived consequences of unreliability. In fact, busy railway networks with frequent and heterogeneous services are highly sensitive to delay propagation, due to conflicts along lines and at stations....

Improving real-time train dispatching: Models, algorithms and applications

Traffic controllers monitor railway traffic sequencing train movements and setting routes with the aim of ensuring smooth train behaviour and limiting as much as existing delays. Due to the strict time limit available for computing a new timetable during operations, which so far is rather infeasible by using existing tools, railway traffic...

Stochastic modelling of train delays and delay propagation in stations

A trade-off exists between efficiently utilizing the capacity of railway networks and improving the reliability and punctuality of train operations. This dissertation presents a new analytical probability model based on blocking time theory which estimates the knock-on delays of trains caused by route conflicts and late transfer connections in...

Punctuality of railway operations and timetable stability analysis

Reliability of railway operations becomes more and more demanding with increasing train traffic, which asks for stable and robust timetables capable of neutralizing deviations from scheduled time-distance paths and stabilizing delay propagation. Timetable performance evaluation is thus a crucial aspect in the railway timetable design process to...

Design and Control of Automated Truck Traffic at Motorway Ramps