Barcelona Plaça de Catalunya

Barcelona’s Plaça de Catalunya station is the terminus for the very frequent Barcelona–Vallès rapid transit and regional railway service. The Ferrocarrils de la Generalitat de Catalunya (FGC) is developing plans to introduce automatic train operations (ATO) to increase operating safety without decreasing network performance.

ATO will be particularly helpful at the approach to the Plaça de Catalunya terminal, where increasing the headway time by even a few seconds would increase the propagation of delays. As part of the ATO system design trenolab evaluated the headway times allowed by different settings of the ATO. Next, we used this data in the microscopic simulation model to test the performance under ideal conditions (deterministic simulation) and considering current input delays (stochastic simulation). We also tested the sensitivity to input delays of a three-track and a four-track terminal layout; results showed that the three-track layout performed better under lower input delays and the four-track under more significant delays.