Author(s)

D. Emery

Abstract

Pacing trains is an important part of railway operations management. It helps to improve the resilience of a timetable to perturbation and reduces significantly both the energy consumption and the wear-and-tear, while increasing the comfort for passengers. Today, only a few Driver Advisory Systems (DAS) with such abilities are already in operation on European major railways. This situation provides great opportunity to promote a unique but flexible system, which can be implemented and used around Europe. The paper describes a concept for a Versatile Driver Advisory System (VDAS). The on-board part of this system is not only fully compatible with a European Driver Advisory System (EDAS) coming from Traffic Management Systems (TMS) but also with other DAS (NEDAS). To ensure flexibility and versatility, EDAS can be implemented in different ways. The use of the standard railway radio GSM-R and the opportunity to send speed advices on the ETCSDMI are milestones on the development of ETML, the management layer of ERTMS. VDAS facilitates the improvement of the operational resilience to perturbation as well as sparing energy, offers synergy opportunities with the ETCS On-board system and, finally, VDAS is based on EDAS which may become a European standard. Keywords: traffic flow, free-flow, capacity management, real time traffic management, speed advice, energy-saving, DAS, ERTMS.

Keywords

traffic flow, free-flow, capacity management, real time traffic management, speed advice, energy-saving, DAS, ERTMS.