Assessment of Service Performance in Railways: Stochastic Train Delay Simulation with Petri Nets

This paper presents a simulation procedure for railway operations, which intends to estimate the impact of disruptions in railway traffic. The approach is based on a Petri nets model capable of simulating railway operations with stochastic variations of train travel times. A description of the building process for traffic simulation with stochastic Petri nets is given. Compared to other simulation models, despite is not necessary a high level of detail of the characteristics of operations and of the infrastructure, it is proved that this simple model can obtain accurate results regarding the reproduction of train operation both under normal conditions or high traffic perturbations. The Petri nets model presented in this paper is developed to simulate train operations of the Cascais line in Lisbon metropolitan area. Furthermore, the model includes stochastic variations of travel times obtained through a statistical analysis of historical data of delays. By simulating delays, was performed an assessment of possible measures to improve railway service reliability in case of traffic disruption.

  • Supplemental Notes:
    • This paper was sponsored by TRB committee AR030 Railroad Operating Technologies
  • Corporate Authors:

    Transportation Research Board

    500 Fifth Street, NW
    Washington, DC  United States  20001
  • Authors:
    • Teixeira, Paulo Fonseca
    • Caetano, L Filipe
  • Conference:
  • Date: 2012

Language

  • English

Media Info

  • Media Type: Digital/other
  • Features: Figures; References; Tables;
  • Pagination: 17p
  • Monograph Title: TRB 91st Annual Meeting Compendium of Papers DVD

Subject/Index Terms

Filing Info

  • Accession Number: 01366395
  • Record Type: Publication
  • Report/Paper Numbers: 12-2420
  • Files: TRIS, TRB
  • Created Date: Mar 29 2012 7:14AM