Planning of Public Transportation and Railway Traffic

Aim

The purpose of the course is to give insight to how the planning and operation of public transportation and railway traffic is carried out. The course is focusing on strategic and tactical aspects such as transport network planning, timetable construction, maintenance scheduling and rolling stock planning. The course is preparatory for research studies. After the course, the student shall be able to:

• describe state-of-the-art in research in planning of public transport and railway traffic.
• understand and examine relevant models and methods used to design a new transport network, evaluate these and discuss their strengths and weaknesses
• understand the process of railway capacity allocation, the importance of timetabling, develop and analyze how optimization models can be used to solve capacity conflicts and coordination problems.
• Implement and evaluate planning methods for demand-responsive services.

Content

The course outlines how the planning of public transportation and railway traffic is carried out today. The course addresses the current prerequisites in terms of political agendas, legislation and its organization with the different stakeholders and their functions. The course content also includes models and methods applied to facilitate the planning and operations. The course is composed of the following parts:

• Review of latest research in the area, based on a selection of journal papers.
• Strategic and tactical timetable construction and capacity allocation for railways
• Planning of demand responsive public transport.