Carrying Capacity Reliability of Railway Networks

The railway network carrying reliability refers to the carrying capacity meeting the OD demand which consciously changed with random and irresistible factors under prescribed conditions and stated time. Based on reviewing the domestic and international achievement of carrying capacity reliability research and analyzing the characteristics of railway transportation, the paper presents the definition of the carrying capacity reliability of railway network. Then, a model for railway network capacity calculation is developed and the approach for reliability determination is proposed. In the final section, a numerical experiment is conducted with different levels of OD demand. The result shows that the fluctuation of OD demand directly affects the carrying capacity of railway networks, and the effective control of fluctuation plays a positive role for a good performance of railway networks.