Train Traffic Simulation based on Analysis of Historical Train Traffic Records for Dense Railway Networks

Abstract

One of the problems in urban railway lines in the Tokyo area is that minor delays occur quite often during morning rush hours. To prevent these minor delays from occurring, railway companies are attempting to employ various types of countermeasures. However, these countermeasures may be extremely expensive to implement and thus, it is critical to quantitatively evaluate the effectiveness of these countermeasures. To this end, train traffic simulations are used. In this paper, we introduce a novel simulation approach that uses historical train traffic records. In addition, we introduce a concept to determine the arrival times of trains by using primarily the running times whereas in existing research the arrival times were determined from the headway time. We determine a rule to estimate the running times from the interval of trains at the previous station. We validated our simulator by comparing the simulation results with actual train traffic data.