DEVELOPMENT OF ANALYTICAL CAPACITY MODELS FOR COMMUTER RAIL OPERATIONS WITH ADVANCED SIGNALING SYSTEMS

摘要

Railways around the world are experiencing growth in traffic demand and need to expand theirnetwork and line capacity. The commuter railway operator in Taiwan, the Taiwan RailwaysAdministration (TRA), is no exception. To accommodate the substantial future demand, the TRAis interested in understanding the potential benefit of adopting various advanced signalingsystems, such as hybrid or moving-block systems. Appropriate evaluation tools are needed forthis purpose; therefore, in this study, we developed a set of analytical capacity models forcommuter rail operations with advanced signaling systems. These models were implemented inthe busiest corridor in the TRA system. The empirical results show that advanced signalingsystems generally have positive capacity effects; however, the benefit of adopting hybridsystems may not be substantially higher than that of adopting a conventional signaling systemdesigned with ideal block lengths. In addition, certain sections' capacities remain unchangedwith upgraded signaling systems due to constraints from the station track layouts. For thesesections, improving track layouts would be the most beneficial approach to increase thecapacities. Therefore, all possible capacity improvement alternatives should be consideredtogether to determine the optimal capacity improvement plan. The use of these proposed capacitymodels can help railway agencies with similar operational environments on their capacitymanagement and resource planning.