Open    Access



Aspects of Railway Capacity and Occupation Time Estimation



Author(s)

Jozef Gašparík and Vladislav Zitrický

Full-Text PDF XML     368 Views

DOI:10.17265/1934-7359/2014.03.007

Faculty of Operation and Economics of Transport and Communication, University of Žilina, Zilina 010 26, Slovak Republic

The priority of the EU transport policy in railway sector is to open up the railway market. The objective is to provide railway undertakings with access to the railway network on equal terms. The main problem is determining the infrastructure capacity. A variety of methodologies are used across Europe for the capacity estimation of railway infrastructure. This diversity has forced railway infrastructure managers to seek a new, common methodology. The UIC methodology is an easy way to calculate the capacity consumption. However, there the possibility to expound this methodology in different ways, which can result in different capacity consumptions. There is an advantage to improve this methodology and to set a clear and unified method of occupation time estimation. The fundamental improvement to UIC methodology is the definition of the occupation time by the trains. This paper gives a description of Slovak and UIC methodologies as a basis for a newly developed approach. The new way of estimation of the capacity consumption (occupation time) is based on a graphic approach. The new methodology concerns the estimation of the infrastructure occupation time and is a conceptual framework developed by the authors for an easier evaluation of occupation time in train traffic diagrams. The new methodology makes the UIC methodology more usable and enables more exact results to be obtained from infrastructure capacity examination.

Methodology for capacity estimation, train traffic diagram, occupation square, occupation rate, buffer time.