Stochastic model-based analysis of railway operation to support traffic planning

The possibility to analyze aspects of the railway capacity at varying the trains population, their travel time and delays, appears to be a useful means to investigate critical situations that affect quality of service in railway systems. In order to satisfy the required levels of the transport service, the capacity may be verified and estimated with good approximation by railway operation simulation models that should be easily applied on every railway plant. This work presents a stochastic model used for railway operation simulation. This model takes in input information about the railway topology and the required service. It reproduces the operation of the elementary devices composing the railway system using the Stochastic Activity Networks (SAN) formalism and the C++ programming language. The model may be applied in railway traffic studies as support for timetable improvements for delay minimization and for planning infrastructural upgrades.