The impact of GSM-R on railway capacity

Abstract

The operation of railway systems strongly depends on the underlying train control system. ERTMS (European Rail Traffic Management System) is a project launched by the European Union in order to increase the interoperability of the national railway systems in Europe. One of the two main components of ERTMS is GSM-R, a wireless communication standard based on GSM. In this paper, we focus on the stochastic nature of GSM-R communication failures and their possible impact on railway capacity. Firstly, we will compare the results of our newly introduced model to the results obtained with a standard blocking time model, applied by a couple of European railway infrastructure managers. After this validation of our model, we will then use the stochastic approach in order to evaluate the impact of GSM-R communication on the railway operation and railway capacity with ETCS level 3. We can show that ETCS level 3 indeed leads to a capacity increase in our setting. So, while a single GSM-R message may be more error-prone than traditional communication, the framework of ETCS can cope well with this imperfection.