Strategic assessment of railway station capacity – Further development of a UIC 406-based approach considering timetable uncertainty

Railway capacity analysis aims to assess the number of trains that can reasonably be operated on a given infrastructure. The UIC timetable compression method is a widely accepted standard for evaluating and comparing the infrastructure utilization of timetable concepts. Originally designed for capacity analysis of railway lines it has been adapted to railway stations in the second version of UIC Code 406. In this paper we discuss further developments of a statistical approach for station capacity analysis using UIC-compression methodology suited for long-term infrastructure planning. It allows to assess the capability of railway station track layouts based on a distributional analysis of different timetable variants derived from a given traffic concept. As a result, the infrastructure’s flexibility to cope with different timetable variants – which is particularly relevant for deregulated transport markets –can be tested. To better account for train-interdependencies, stations are considered in their entirety and a new time-window oriented gap-filling approach is introduced that preserves the overall timetable structure while allowing to perform local optimization of infrastructure occupation. The approach is demonstrated in a case study based on the Southern part of the Swedish railway network.In addition to the funding from the Swedish Transport Administration (Trafikverket), funding has been provided from KTH's funding from the Swedish government (SFO). QC 20221011Kapacitet i nätverk (KAIN