A New Approach for Estimation of Railway Services Reliability

The importance of railway service reliability has been growing from both passengers’ perspective and infrastructure’s management point of view. For the former, it seems to be one of the key factors in modal choice, especially for commuters; while in the latter, a trade off exists among capacity, reliability, and punctuality increase, which may lead to better rail network utilization, even without significant infrastructure improvements. Existing methods for reliability estimation are currently not able to adequately represent system behavior; as they simply consider the number of trains within given delay thresholds, and completely neglect delay distribution, which actually plays an important role for both passengers’ quality perception and line capacity estimations. Moreover, these estimations are often based on arrival time at terminal stations, with no consideration of delays at intermediate stops. This paper showcases a new reliability index that is based on the shape of trains’ delay distribution. When compared to existing methodologies, such index may lead to results that better represent the real effects of punctuality on railway operations; moreover, the proposed reliability index can be applied to either a line or a railway node. For verification and comparison purposes, two different case studies were included in the research effort: a railway node in Italy and a commuter line in the United States.

• Supplemental Notes:
  • This paper was sponsored by TRB committee AR010 Intercity Passenger Rail.
• Corporate Authors:

  Transportation Research Board

  500 Fifth Street, NW
  Washington, DC  United States  20001
• Authors:
  • Longo, Giovanni
  • Medeossi, Giorgio
  • Oricchio, Valerio
• Conference:
  • Transportation Research Board 93rd Annual Meeting
  • Location: Washington DC
  • Date: 2014-1-12 to 2014-1-16
• Date: 2014

Language

• English

Media Info

• Media Type: Digital/other
• Features: Figures; References; Tables;
• Pagination: 15p
• Monograph Title: TRB 93rd Annual Meeting Compendium of Papers

Subject/Index Terms

• TRT Terms: Case studies; Delays; Estimating; Quality of service; Railroad transportation; Reliability
• Geographic Terms: Italy; United States
• Subject Areas: Planning and Forecasting; Railroads; I72: Traffic and Transport Planning;

Filing Info

• Accession Number: 01518982
• Record Type: Publication
• Report/Paper Numbers: 14-3082
• Files: TRIS, TRB, ATRI
• Created Date: Mar 21 2014 11:27AM