PTV Group
PTV Group
Network Rail Adopts New PTV Solution for Station Capacity Analysis
This article first appeared in the Railway-News magazine Issue 5 2021.
Analysis of rail station capacity is a key function of Network Rail, which owns the over 2,500 train stations across Great Britain.
While it is only responsible for the management of 20 of the biggest and busiest stations, it is the asset owner for all stations and must approve all functional changes to station design and layouts. Station capacity planning has recently become a particularly important topic, given the social distancing guidelines introduced across the public transport network. It is Traffic & Capacity Planning also expected that the successor organisation of Network Rail set out in The Williams-Shapps Plan for Rail will have a larger role in the management of stations.
Balancing Detail and Time to Support Programmes More Efficiently
Currently, there are two main options to analyse the capacity of rail stations. The first is to build a very detailed microsimulation model, which usually requires a large amount of data including passenger numbers, accurate station layouts, and calibrated parameters. These models can be expensive to build and need frequent maintenance to ensure that they remain accurate. Hence, they are only used for large stations such as the London Terminals, where there are complex interactions between passengers across multiple concourses, retail facilities, platforms and exits. The second option is spreadsheet-based analysis using simple metrics and KPIs, without detailed representation of station layout and passenger conflicts. Therefore, it may not be able to capture the level of detail required to analyse different station layouts and evaluate possible interventions to manage capacity. While these tools have served planners well in the past, there is a large gap in detail and modelling effort between these two options.
A ‘Middle Ground’ Solution
The new tool aims to provide a “middle ground” between high-level analysis and microsimulation, utilising PTV Visum to store data – such as passenger movements – and run the simulation, before exporting a standard set of analyses such as passenger flows and platform densities and clearance times.
