Headway generation with ROBERTO

Abstract

This paper on the use of the computer program ROBERTO for generating headway times is from the proceedings of the 12th International Conference on Computer System Design and Operation in Railways and Other Transit Systems, held in Beijing, China, in 2010. Rather than use the traditional solution for congestion in a railway network (the building of new infrastructure), the author reports on the search for alternative ways to solve capacity and quality bottlenecks on the Dutch rail service. The Dutch rail manager, ProRail, wants to evaluate and improve the timetable development process. By applying design principles and by other conditions, buffer times can be used in different timetable construction phases. An important design principle is the use of headway times to separate two trains in the timetable safely. To improve the knowledge and application of headway times, ProRail started the development of ROBERTO, a tool that can generate a large number of headway times. The aim is to compute headway times for specific situations and also to determine general headway times for use on a more global level. The input for ROBERTO is generated by simulating train characteristics, block section occupation times and signaling aspects. ROBERTO then combines possible conflicting train pairs and calculates the headway times. The authors conclude that the results and the calculation performance of ROBERTO are promising.