Abstract
This paper describes how the operation of railway systems strongly depends on the underlying train control system. The EuropeanRail Traffic Management System (ERTMS) is a project launched by the European Union in order to increase the interoperability of the national railway systems in Europe. One of the two main components of ERTMS is GSMR, a wireless communication standard based on GSM. This paper focuses on the stochastic nature of GSM-R communication failures and their possible impact on railway capacity. Firstly, the paper compares the results of our newly introduced model to the results obtained with a standard blocking time model, applied by a couple of European railway infrastructure managers. After this validation of our model, we will then use the stochastic approach in order to evaluate the impact of GSM-R communication on the railway operation and railway capacity with ETCS level 3. The paper shows that ETCS level 3 indeed leads to a capacity increase in our setting. So, while a single GSM-R message may be more error-prone than traditional communication, the framework of ETCS can cope well with this imperfection.
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