A model for attributing the responsibilities of delay propagation on railway networks

This paper presents a new model for analysing delay propagation in a railway network and for distributing responsibility among different players. The model makes use of registered data about daily circulation. Starting from a simple hypothesis, an analytic instrument is inferred with the aim of attributing to each subject its part of responsibility, in terms of minutes of delay caused or propagated in the network. Previously the primary delay model was presented; the novelty of this work is the definition and the evaluation of the so-called secondary-delays: they aren't directly caused by the interaction between two following trains, but they come from the propagation of the delay through a train, which isn't the original cause. It means that the considered train isn't travelling along the line directly after the originally delayed one. After having compared simulation results and data registered by train operator companies, it became clear that a secondary-delay contribution was needed to represent the actual reality of the train propagation phenomenon completely.