Individual approaches for different scopes

To validate and analyse the consequences of infrastructure and/or timetable changes, several approaches exists. LUKS supports the following established approaches.

Timetabling

LUKS-K: Timetable construction and scheduling

Timetabling is the appropiate approch for a profound evaluation of the correlations between an exact given timetable and the infrastructure. It permits a proof of feasibility of a timetable with consideration of additional constraints (e.g. train intervals, connections, turn-arounds).

Capacity

LUKS-A: Calculation of capacities and operation quality

Capacity calculations by queuing (also known as analytic approach) are applied to perform long- to mid-term evaluations of infrastructure variants or timetable concepts. The usage of aggregated train types instead of an exactly given timetable allows a very quick setup, since there’s no need to compile the entire timetable for each infrastructure variant. Futhermore it permits the modelling of yet uncertain constraints (e.g. knowledge on the number of trains).

Simulation

LUKS-S: Simulation of timetabling and operation

Simulation is applied to perform mid-term to short-term evaluations with comprehensive consideration of constraints. LUKS supports two modes of simulation: Simulation of timetabling: The practicability of timetabling for a given infrastructure is evaluated by an asynchronous simulation approch. As an input parameter, a rough train-path order needs to be given in advance. Simulation of operation: The operation’s quality for a given timetable and infrastructure is evaluated by disturbing operation with random delays.

Compression

LUKS-C: Concatenation by UIC code 406

Based on a given timetable, the UIC 406 concatenation approach can be performed for several investigation and evaluation areas, time windows and under various parametric configurations. LUKS can therefore be considered as a generic toolbox implementing the concatenation approach but leaving wide flexibility to define infrastructure manager specific characteristics and rules.