Analyzing and Evaluating Infrastructure Capacity of Railway Passenger Station by Mesoscopic Simulation Method

This paper presents a novel mesoscopic simulation method for analyzing and calculating carrying capacity of railway passenger stations. Due to the random disturbances of train operations in station area, a simulation method that considers the random disturbances of train delays and operation time is proposed. In this paper, occupation time of each route and track is accumulated, and then resources exploitation rate and the carrying capacity of stations can be estimated. A new computer-aided tool was developed and successfully implemented for analyzing and evaluating the carrying capacity of railway passenger stations. The merits of the proposed method are illustrated through a case study on one of the largest integrated transport terminals in China to demonstrate the effectiveness and validation of the random probability method through calculations of each switch group exploitation rate and evaluation of the carrying capacity of this station.