Dottorato in INFRASTRUTTURE E TRASPORTI

Titolo della tesi: Combined Lines-Nodes Capacity Assessment in Freight-Passengers Complex Railway Networks

The writing of this Thesis refers to Doctoral research in the Infrastructures and Transportation Engineering at the Department of Civil, Building and Environmental Engineering of Sapienza University of Rome, with the collaboration of the research group for the Railway and Public Transport at Department of Science and Technology within Linköping University. This work is addressing the issues of the combined effect on lines operation of routes conflicts in stations and the propagation in stations of delays suffered along the lines. The Thesis proposes innovative solutions for the combined calculation of the capacity of the node-station complex systems, by applying analytical and simulation methods to rationalize the traffic and minimize the delay. The comprehensive framework includes the competitiveness of European transport industries based on the Technical Specification for Interoperability (TSI) with the purposes of a unique, harmonized and generally valid understanding on how to increase frequency, punctuality, speed, and capacity. The consequence is the need to estimate the line-node capacity of complex railway networks for mixed-traffic in the reference operational scenario including the full operation of ETCS/ERTMS. The research starts from the application of the methods in a quantitative virtual test network including single and double track lines and three stations, in view of the applications to a complex case study including the whole Trieste railway node, situated in north-eastern Italy, including the main passengers and freight terminals and the lines operated for both services. Afterwards, the traffic simulation by a largely recognized software (Opentrack®) completed the study by allowing at comparative analyses for the validation and the finer tuning of the entire methodological body.