Impact assessment method to forecast high speed railways punctuality due to technology evolution

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Impact assessment method to forecast high speed railways punctuality due to technology evolution

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Kurt, Filiz / Hainz, Svenja / Meyer zu Hörste, Michael / Brinkmann, Florian

Delayed trains not only cause passenger annoyance, but also lead to a significant overall delay of the passenger to his or her destination. Especially in high-speed railway, delayed trains can cause a significant overall delay of the passenger due to missed connections. This can have a high negative impact on passenger satisfaction and consequently on the modal split. In high-speed rail systems, a large number of delay minutes are caused by technical failures. Investments in cost-intensive technical innovations are a fruitful method in order to eliminate these technical failures. But to estimate the impact of technical innovations on the punctuality of high-speed trains, microscopic simulations are often needed to be carried out using a huge number of technical and operational details as input and thus increasing the complexity, cost and computer capacity for this task. For this reason, a simplified methodology is necessary in order to provide a first orientation on the impact of technical developments on punctuality. Such a methodology has been developed and applied in the IMPACT-2 project of the Shift2Rail (S2R) initiative to assess the impact of significant technical developments on rail operations in a modernised European high-speed rail system. The objective of this research is to provide a simplified approach for decision makers in the railway sector to assess the expected impact of proposed and planned technical innovations on punctuality after their implementation.