What is Modelling of Railway Infrastructure

One of the most important problems encountered and needed to be solved in railway systems is train timetabling (scheduling) problem. This is the problem of determining a feasible timetable for sets of trains which does not violate track capacities and additionally satisfies some operational constraints of the railway system. In this chapter, a feasible timetable generator framework for stochastic simulation modelling is introduced. The objective is to obtain a feasible train timetable for all trains in the railway system, which includes train arrival and departure times at all visited stations and calculated average train travel time. Although this chapter focuses on train timetabling (scheduling) problem, the developed general framework can also be used for train dispatching (rescheduling) problem if the model can be fed by the real-time data. Since, the developed simulation model includes stochastic events, and it can easily cope with the disturbances that occur in the railway systems, it can be used for dispatching.