Author(s)

A. Nash & D. Huerlimann

Abstract

OpenTrack is a user-friendly railroad network simulation program developed at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology’s Institute for Transportation Planning and Systems (ETH IVT). It is a microscopic model that simulates rail system operations based on user defined train, infrastructure, and timetable databases. OpenTrack functions as a railroad laboratory, by, for example, allowing users to define incidents and take infrastructure out of service to evaluate alternative scenarios. The program uses a mixed discrete/continuous simulation process that calculates both the continuous solution of train motion equations and the discrete processes of signal box states and delay distributions. It generates a wide variety of data that can be easily presented in many formats including graphs (e.g. timespace diagrams), tables, and image

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