Simulation of dynamic station dwell time delays on high frequency rail transport systems. : Representing dynamic station delays with opentrack.

The railway simulation software solutions available today are increasingly used for other purposes than they initially have been created for. These software products aimed at first to recreate the operations on a normal railroad network, with often a schedule allowing for minor delays. However, nowadays light rail as well as underground railway networks, which are highly congested and have high passenger exchange within the cities, are also simulated. Although these systems do have the same basic functionality as the full railway, there are effects that sometimes can’t be represented easily with the existing software solutions. One of these effects is the dynamic delay build up at the stations during peak-hour traffic: a vehicle that is already delayed will get more people at the next station, making the passenger exchange longer, and therefore accumulating delays. This often leads to the widely known effect of bunching, where several vehicles follow each other closely. This master thesis will show a method to implement the effect of dynamic dwell time delays on high frequency, high passenger frequentation systems in an existing microscopic railway simulation. The application of this effect is based on the analysis of the red lines of the Stockholm Tunnelbana system simulated with the OpenTrack software during a case study. There, the results show clearly that the effect of a dynamically growing delay can be achieved with the implemented metho