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Simulating the Punctuality Impacts of Early Freight Train Departures

Johansson, Ingrid ; Sipilä, Hans and Palmqvist, Carl-William LU orcid (2022) World Congress on Railway Research 2022 p.1-6
Abstract
Railway traffic usually adheres to a timetable, but in Sweden, around two-thirds of the freight trains depart before they are scheduled, often by hours. Even though they occur in real operations, early departures have rarely been included in simulation studies and the effects on punctuality are not fully investigated. With a macroscopic simulation tool such as PROTON, large networks can be simulated in a short time, which makes the simulation process easier. This paper uses the tool PROTON to perform a macroscopic simulation case study on the Swedish Western mainline to investigate how early departures of freight trains affect punctuality. The resulting output is a marginal overall punctuality improvement of about +0.5 percentage points.... (More)
Railway traffic usually adheres to a timetable, but in Sweden, around two-thirds of the freight trains depart before they are scheduled, often by hours. Even though they occur in real operations, early departures have rarely been included in simulation studies and the effects on punctuality are not fully investigated. With a macroscopic simulation tool such as PROTON, large networks can be simulated in a short time, which makes the simulation process easier. This paper uses the tool PROTON to perform a macroscopic simulation case study on the Swedish Western mainline to investigate how early departures of freight trains affect punctuality. The resulting output is a marginal overall punctuality improvement of about +0.5 percentage points. In addition, different levels of primary run time and dwell time delays have been used as simulation input, based on empirical data. The resulting ratio between primary and secondary delays appear to vary greatly between different train types, but overall about 30% were primary and 70% secondary. Future work includes modelling and calibration of departure deviations, which vary more between different train types, and where it is more difficult to separate between primary and secondary delays. Separating distributions based on train type or location will also be considered. (Less)
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author
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organization
publishing date
type
Contribution to conference
publication status
published
subject
pages
6 pages
conference name
World Congress on Railway Research 2022
conference location
Birmingham, United Kingdom
conference dates
2022-06-06 - 2022-06-10
language
English
LU publication?
yes
id
e13ff85f-dbfe-4f6a-9c81-cc0b01199fe8
date added to LUP
2023-03-24 18:18:04
date last changed
2023-03-28 02:29:48
@misc{e13ff85f-dbfe-4f6a-9c81-cc0b01199fe8,
  abstract     = {{Railway traffic usually adheres to a timetable, but in Sweden, around two-thirds of the freight trains depart before they are scheduled, often by hours. Even though they occur in real operations, early departures have rarely been included in simulation studies and the effects on punctuality are not fully investigated. With a macroscopic simulation tool such as PROTON, large networks can be simulated in a short time, which makes the simulation process easier. This paper uses the tool PROTON to perform a macroscopic simulation case study on the Swedish Western mainline to investigate how early departures of freight trains affect punctuality. The resulting output is a marginal overall punctuality improvement of about +0.5 percentage points. In addition, different levels of primary run time and dwell time delays have been used as simulation input, based on empirical data. The resulting ratio between primary and secondary delays appear to vary greatly between different train types, but overall about 30% were primary and 70% secondary. Future work includes modelling and calibration of departure deviations, which vary more between different train types, and where it is more difficult to separate between primary and secondary delays. Separating distributions based on train type or location will also be considered.}},
  author       = {{Johansson, Ingrid and Sipilä, Hans and Palmqvist, Carl-William}},
  language     = {{eng}},
  month        = {{06}},
  pages        = {{1--6}},
  title        = {{Simulating the Punctuality Impacts of Early Freight Train Departures}},
  url          = {{https://lup.lub.lu.se/search/files/141365821/Johansson_Sipil_Palmqvist_2022_WCRR.pdf}},
  year         = {{2022}},
}