Evaluation of economic efficiency of rail operation through simulation

Abstract

An increasing traffic demand and competition between the traffic modes force the railway operators to improve their economical results. This can be achieved primarily by reducing costs and by keeping a high standard in service and quality whereby an increase of attractiveness for potential customers can be realised. Especially the Deutsche Bahn AG, while preparing itself for going public, demands for a higher relevance of the financial result. Cost and Benefit are the two factors determining the economic efficiency of rail operations. For both the infrastructure managers and the train operator companies a possible pre-evaluation of imaginable investment scenarios is of high significance when trying to optimise their cost-benefit structure. Helpful hereby can be railway operation simulations which not only consider operative aspects but also economical ones. While there exists quite a bit of supporting software for simulating possible operation scenarios (e.g. RailSys®, OpenTrack®), it is yet not standard to reuse obtained simulation results for an economic evaluation of the considered scenarios. The Institute of Transportation Systems has therefore implemented a software link between the simulation software RailSys® and the in-house created Cost-Benefit Tool. With the latter the cost and revenue positions of the evaluated system and scenario can be calculated. The idea of a link between railway operation simulations and economic efficiency evaluations is discussed in the first part. In the next step results of first simulations are presented and discussed. Basis for the first examinations is a pre-defined regional railway for which different equipment scenarios were implemented in RailSys®.