Performance indicators for railway timetables

Abstract

Railway timetables must provide competitive travel times and at the same time be able to withstand delays, perturbations, and variations in operating conditions without losing functionality, to achieve a high service level during operations. The art of designing such a timetable relies on several performance indicators related to individual train paths (running and dwelling), dependencies between train paths (headways, turning, transferring, etc.), and integrated train paths (corridors, networks). These performance indicators include infrastructure occupation, timetable stability, feasibility, robustness, and resilience. The quality of the timetable design process can be evaluated by the manner in which these performance indicators are dealt with. This paper gives an overview of these performance indicators, their importance in the timetable design, and their interrelations, and proposes four timetabling levels that represent how well the timetable performance criteria are taken into account in the timetable design process of a specific railway.