Conference article

MTR (Mass Transit Railway) is contracted by Stockholm Public Transport (SLL) to operate the Stockholm commuter trains. The number of passengers is increasing and traffic is expected to increase by 50 % in ten years. This will therefore require further investigations to enable investments in additional infrastructure and rolling stock. A generic model has been developed in order to screen future timetable situations and find resource efficient timetable alternatives and investments needed to enable the expected traffic increase. Short turning traffic lines is one way to reach high efficiency for a commuter system. However, the sequence of short turning and full route lines will affect congestion heavily. Consequently different permutations of a termination pattern results in different passenger distributions on the traffic lines. The core idea of the timetabling model is to combine congestion efficient permutations for the four branches into network timetables. A number of important features of the timetable are influenced by the choice of termination patterns, permutations of these patterns, the time rotation of the entire timetable and the requisite of symmetry. The latter is required in order to enable long distance traffic on shared line sections. Examples of important features are: the termination times, the number of train set needed, the need for additional termination tracks and the recovery and punctuality that can be reached. A brief description of the commuter rail network, the demand and the prerequisites for the timetable are presented and discussed. Similarly the main ideas of the generic model are outlined. The method is elucidated by an illustration of a future traffic increase by 25 %.

Planning, scheduling, robust timetables, congestion management