An Investigation into the Impact of Positioning System Inaccuracies with a Traffic Management System on Line Capacity

Demand for passenger and freight railway services has increased in recent years. This puts the railway system under pressure to maximize the use of available capacity. An intelligent traffic management systems (TMS) is used to improve railway performance and handle the railway traffic once a disturbance happens. TMS needs a variety of input data to monitor the current traffic, predict the future traffic and solve potential conflicts. A fundamental input parameter of an intelligent TMS is the position of trains in real-time. Train position reporting inaccuracies can significantly influence the TMS performance and lead it to provide suboptimal solutions. In this paper, we assess the impact of position reporting inaccuracies on a local TMS applied to timetables consuming different amounts of capacity. A case study on Dundee Central Junction, in the Scotland/UK, has been investigated. The results are compared using the trains’ total delay and the number of cases where TMS has been misguided and a suboptimal solution was produced. The results show that, once TMS is misguided by positioning inaccuracies, a high capacity timetable’s TMS solution leads to more delays compared with a lower capacity timetable.