Call for Papers

Aim and Scope

The 3rd International Seminar on Railway Operations Modelling and Analysis will contribute to interdisciplinary diffusion in the railway operations research area through the discussion of analytical, combinatorial and simulation approaches and project results by engineers, mathematicians, economists and computer scientists. The following research questions focussing on high quality railway timetabling, efficient and reliable operations of infrastructure and trains will be tackled during the Seminar, among others:

• How to model capacity and robustness in saturated railway networks?
• Which is the impact of network timetable stability on punctuality?
• How to investigate systematically the generation mechanisms of timetable perturbations?
• Which is the optimal size, temporal and spatial distribution of timetable margins?
• How punctuality standards can be implemented in capacity estimation models?
• Which approaches are suitable for analysis and modelling of the distribution of running, boarding/alighting and dwell times?
• What is the impact of interoperability requirements (e.g. STI) and traffic control systems (e.g. ERTMS) on capacity and reliability?
• Which objectives and constraints are suitable to optimise network timetables?
• How to estimate optimal values for track occupancy, frequency and level-of-service?
• Which methods are useful to evaluate timetable quality and operations performance?
• How to integrate capacity modelling / methods for lines and stations?
• Which methods exist to optimize signalling and train control systems performances in case of heterogeneous traffic?
• How can the efficiency of rescheduling measures in networks be estimated?
• How to model the optimal allocation of rolling stock and rotation of train crews in planning and during incident management?
• Which is the impact of punctuality, comfort and information on customer satisfaction?
• Are stochastic analytical and simulation models sufficiently validated?
• How to implement dispatching options in rescheduling models?
• How to use rescheduling and other methods to reduce energy consumption?
• What are promising methods to improve the production accuracy?

Contributions and Paper Submission

The abstract submission is closed. The abstracts will be reviewed by an international scientific committee and the authors of the papers will be notified by July 31, 2008.

Draft papers of a maximum length of 20 pages are to be submitted by November 1, 2008, in accordance to the format described in the Authors section. The papers will be reviewed by independent experts from at least two countries and the accepted final papers will be published in the proceedings of the seminar. Professionals and researchers are also encouraged to present practical studies and open research issues for discussion during the seminar. The presentation files of the contributions will be distributed on CD-ROM to all participants.

The call for papers is also available in PDF: RailZurich2009Call.pdf