A State of the Art on Railway Simulation Modelling Software Packages and Their Application to Designing Baggage Transfer Services

There is a new baggage transfer service suggested in Newcastle Central Station. In order to prove that this service is feasible, a simulation model can be developed to test the concept and operating pattern behind. For the purposes of this paper, we intend to organize a literature review on simulation modelling software packages employed to study service design. Specifically, this paper has compared five different simulation software packages used by the railway industry to study service-related challenges. As a result, it is suggested that SIMUL8, a macroscopic discrete event-based software package, should be used among the five compared ones because of its simplicity and the ability to give practical results for the design and performance of such a baggage transfer system

Discrete event simulation of Maglev transport considering traffic waves

A magnetically levitated vehicle (Maglev) system is under commercialization as a new transportation system in Korea. The Maglev is operated by an unmanned automatic control system. Therefore, the plan of train operation should be carefully established and validated in advance. In general, when making a train operation plan, statistically predicted traffic data is used. However, a traffic wave often occurs in real train service, and demand-driven simulation technology is required to review a train operation plan and service quality considering traffic waves. We propose a method and model to simulate Maglev operation considering continuous demand changes. For this purpose, we employed a discrete event model that is suitable for modeling the behavior of railway passenger transportation. We modeled the system hierarchically using discrete event system specification (DEVS) formalism. In addition, through implementation and an experiment using the DEVSim++ simulation environment, we tested the feasibility of the proposed model. Our experimental results also verified that our demand-driven simulation technology can be used for a priori review of train operation plans and strategies