An optimisation framework for determination of capacity in railway networks

Within the railway industry, high quality estimates on railway capacity is crucial information, that helps railway companies to utilise the expensive (infrastructure) resources as efficiently as possible. This paper therefore proposes an optimisation framework to estimate the capacity of a railway network based on a mix of train types, the infrastructure and rolling stock used.

The framework consist of two steps. In the first step the maximum number of trains is found according to the predefined mix of train types. In the second step additional trains are added based on weights assigned to the train types. This is done using a mathematical model which is solved with a heuristic.

The developed approach is used on a case network to obtain the capacity of the given railway system. Furthermore, we test different parameters to explore computation time, precision and sensitivity to input of the approach.