Dynamisch Railverkeersmanagement besturingsconcept voor railverkeer op basis van het Lagenmodel Verkeer en Vervoer

Society demands that railways should perform better than they do currently: their product must become more reliable and cheaper, and the railways must be able to react to changes in the market and the environment more flexibly. The starting point of this thesis is that in other industries market forces and innovations are key factors to the improvement of performance and that this must also be possible in the railway industry. The hypothesis is that, in spite of the restructuring of the railways during the nineties of the 20th century in Europe ("separation of infrastructure management and train operations"), the potencies of market forces and innovations are insufficiently exploited and that this to a large extent can be attributed to the fact that the processes within the railway industry are tightly interwoven. "Everything" seems to be connected with "everything", especially in the operational heart of the railways: the rail traffic system. This thesis consists of two parts: the Transport Layer Model and Rail Traffic Management. In the first part, a generic conceptual model for the functional analysis of the traffic and transport system is developed called the Transport Layer Model. In this model, the traffic and transport system is considered as a composition of services and markets. The Transport Layer Model is applied to divide the railways into subsystems, with the objectives of improving the opportunities for market forces and innovations, and structuring the role of the government. In the second part of this thesis, the control of one of these subsystems, the rail traffic system, is analysed. The systematic integration of feedback loops into the control cycle leads to the development of a new control concept called Dynamic Rail Traffic Management the application of which can make the production of rail traffic services more reliable, more flexible and cheaper.Trai