Research project on capacity evaluation

In January 2024 the two-year research project “Determining the capacity of railway lines - Analogies between the quality criteria of analytical and simulative methods”, financed and overseen by the DZSF, the German Centre for Rail Traffic Research, started. The project will be conducted by a team comprising the three partners: trenolab, DLR - Institute of Transportation Systems and RTS - Professorship for Design and Operation of Rail Transport Systems at Technical University of Munich.

The aim of the project is to establish a relationship between simulative and analytical capacity calculations in Germany, as well as their corresponding parameters and quality measures. The goal is to develop scientific approaches to assess the comparability of the two methodologies and their respective results in rail traffic and infrastructure planning.

The results will help the Eisenbahn-Bundesamt (German Railway Authority) in its supervisory role in railway capacity management and in assessing the impact of infrastructure modifications on network capacity. The quality measurement factors, developed in this project are also expected to be relevant for the timetable-based infrastructure development in the framework of federal transport planning, the implementation of the Deutschlandtakt and the monitoring of infrastructure investment planning.

Prof. Norman Weik, Professor for Planning and Operation of rail transport systems at the TU München and one of the three project partners explains “Considering the planning of railway infrastructure based on the premise of clock-faced scheduling, research regarding the application of both analytical and simulative methods scrutinising railway capacity on lines is needed. In this project we want to reach a point where we better understand the comparability of results and develop an assessment scheme to evaluate operational quality in both methods”.