The redesign process of the timetable for the Dutch railway sector

Abstract

The design of a new timetable for a railway system is a complex process. Focusing only on the product and the exchange of information between design phases, does not cover the complexity. Strategic actor behaviour and contextual factors are underexposed by research on theory of designing civil infrastructures. Therefore, we investigate the redesign process of the timetable for the Dutch railways from two perspectives: 1) an engineering perspective; 2) an actor and context perspective. To indicate the successes and failures of the redesign process it is characterised using the PSI framework which includes these two perspectives. Several design phases are distinguished and at the transitions misalignments are identified. The misalignments are compared with empirical data to conclude on a set of improvements. Areas perceived as problematic are knowledge transfer between design phases, decomposition of one design phase into several products, and composition of multiple products into one final design.