Automated Construction of Mesoscopic Railway Infrastructure Models Supporting Station Throat Capacity Assessment

Abstract

Assessment of the traffic capacity of a rail infrastructure involved within railway stations is one of the basic components of the rail transport planning process. An important part of the rail infrastructure in the stations is station throat, which typically comprises many switches and track crossings. Station throat acts as operating bottleneck that frequently has the largest impact on the station’s traffic capacity. The capacity of a station throat is often conveniently assessed based on the use of mesoscopic computer simulation. This requires (among other things) a suitable submodel of the throat infrastructure to be set up. This article presents innovative algorithms for the automated creation of mesoscopic target model of station throat based on consecutive transformations of an initial (intuitive) microscopic model. Compared to the hitherto used manual process, the automated procedure accelerates the construction of the target station throat model and eliminates its structural errors. The applied research method is based both on the original design of the target mathematical model graph (a vertex-weighted directed graph) for the representation of the station throat infrastructure and on the design and verification of innovative graph algorithms that perform multiple aggregation transformations of this model in order to perform its maximum admissible topological simplification. The results of the research conducted have helped to enhance and efficiently use the station throat capacity assessment methodology. The use of the algorithms is demonstrated in a case study concerning station throats within a minor railway station in the Czech Republic.