Cloud Railroad Simulator

M. Aristombayeva

1 a

, A. Duisenbayeva

1 b

, K. Shubenkova

2 c

and V. Shepelev

3 d

Department of Mathematical and Computer Modeling Computing, Kazakh-British Technical University,

Tole bi Street, Almaty, Kazakhstan

Kazan Federal University, Syuyumbike prosp., Naberezhnye Chelny, Russia

South Ural State University, Chelyabinsk, Russia

Keywords: Railroad, Railway, Single Track, Double Track, Throughput, Carrying Capacity.

Abstract: The throughput and carrying capacity is the important characteristics of the railway lines which shows

transportation opportunities. This is impossible to plan the freight traffic on the net without it. This paper

introduces a simple cloud railroad simulator for cargo trains for calculating the throughput and carrying

capacity. For simulation purposes the user need to fill in all necessary data in a browser, and the results will

be shown on the server side. Once data has been entered into the program, the system allows to obtain a more

accurate representation of reality of the railway system.

1 INTRODUCTION

In Kazakhstan railways play an important role for

development of economic and industrial areas, also a

key role in the formation of international relations

between countries (Bekmagambetov M, 2005)

Railway transportation is an integral part of the

country’s transport system, which needs to be

modernized to meet the requirements for passenger

and freight traffic.

An important problem that arises when it is

necessary to develop increasing the volume of

transport is the timely development of the railway

infrastructure. The need for large amounts of long-

term repayable capital investments raises the task of

quantifying the adequacy of the proposed technical

and technological solutions at the lowest possible

cost. That is why it is very important to test the

throughput and the carrying capacity of the railway

transportation system before expensive construction

has been done.

The throughput of railway section is the largest

number of trains (for a single track section - pairs of

trains) of the established weight, which can be

traversed per unit of time (day, hour) for this section

https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2609-5867

https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3596-4841

https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9246-6232

https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1143-2031

with the existing technical weapons, adopted by the

system of train traffic and labour organization

railways. For single track lines with equal dimensions

in directions, the throughput is expressed by the

number of pairs of trains of the established mass of

both directions, and for double-track lines and single-

track ones in the unpaired schedule, the number of

trains of the established mass for each direction

separately.

The number of trains or pairs that can pass along

the lines is determined usually per day, and for

suburban areas with intensive passenger traffic (due

to large unevenness) - for the day and for the period

of the maximum loading of the site - peak hour.

When calculating the reserve capacity, the

difference of the available railway capacity and the

required line capacity of the station is taken into

account. The available railway capacity is the

maximum size of the train movement, which can be

realized depending on its technical equipment. The

required line capacity is the number of trains that need

to be implemented to fulfil the transportation plan.

Aristombayeva, M., Duisenbayeva, A., Shubenkova, K. and Shepelev, V.

Cloud Railroad Simulator.

DOI: 10.5220/0007876806590662

In Proceedings of the 5th International Conference on Vehicle Technology and Intelligent Transport Systems (VEHITS 2019), pages 659-662

ISBN: 978-989-758-374-2

659

2 CLOUD RAILROAD

SIMULATOR

Simulation provides an important methods of analysis

which can be verified, communicated and

understood. It especially valuable for railroad

planning. In this section, we represent a simulator for

calculating carrying capacity in railway station. A

railway station can be decomposed into rail tracks,

switches, throat sections, yards and etc.

To simulate the railway station, we need to fill in

the following parameters for train and switch objects.

2.1 Input Data

Cloud railroad simulator requires data in two objects:

train and switch.

Parameters for train object:

 the track length

 the number of passenger trains

 the number of freight trains

 the density of the net

And parameters for switch object: (Fig. 1)

 the track object

 the location of the switch

 the number of tracks on the switch

 the amount of trains which are expected at a

separate point

 the density of the net

 the overlocking

 the braking

 the time forward, backward and stationary

intervals

Figure 1: Input Data.

2.2 Simulation

In order to run a simulation the user specifies train

parameters and switch parameters on a preferences

browser.

The procedure of calculating carrying capacity is as

follows:

The railway power is determined by its

throughput and carrying capacity. The throughput of

the railway section is simply the daily time budget

divided by graph period movement of trains. The

duration of the daily time budget depends on the time

required for repair and construction works, on the

technology of their maintenance, on the number of

main roads and type of mechanisms used. And the

throughput is calculated based on the formula 1:

  

  













(1)





- technical operation time, in min;





- graph period movement of trains, in min;





- coefficient of operation reliability of technical

means

According to the formula, first, we need to

compute the technical operation time 



. It is a

period of time that is free of trains, provided in the

traffic schedule and necessary for performing work

on the current maintenance and repair of track

devices, contact network, signalling, centralization

and interlocking. Then, we need to calculate the graph

period 



. And finally, we can obtain the throughput

of the railway section.

LogiTrans 4.0 2019 - Special Session on Logistics and Transport in the Industry 4.0

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Technical operation time depends on the type of

machines and mechanisms used, as well as on the

accepted technology of work and is adopted in the

calculations of available capacity as:

on double-track lines and sections with inserts for

non-stop crossing of trains - 120 min

on single-track sections - 60 min

The value of the coefficient reliability of technical

means is determined depending on the type of traction

and the number of main roads. The coefficient

considers the passport reliability of the technical

infrastructure facilities and possible failures in their

operation during exploitation. The value of 



varies

in range 0,87 - 0,98 for single-track sections, and 0,86

- 0,98 for double-track lines. In our system we are

using 



= 0,96.

The graph period is the total time of train

movement with braking and overlocking and

stationary intervals for separate points. It is:

on a single-track section - the time of the

occupation of the trail characteristic for the given

schedule by a group of trains periodically recurring

during the day;

on a double-track section with automatic blocking

- the interval between trains;

on a double-track section with a semi-automatic

blocking - the time of one-train distraction and the

station interval.

The carrying capacity is determined by the power

of road freight transport. This number of tons of cargo

trains that the road can carry per unit time in each

direction. The carrying capacity in million tons/year

can be determined using the following formula 2:

  

  







 





 







(2)

The variables used in carrying capacity are

defined as follows:





– available throughput of cargo moving in a given

direction, trains/days;





- the average gross and net weight of the train,

depending on the established mass of the train and the

structure of the freight flow;

- the ratio of the net weight to the gross weight of

the train, depends on the kind of wagons and the

structure of the wagon-stream;





,



– respectively amount of cargo transported in

accelerated and prefabricated trains, million tons per

year.

Based on time table, train arrival flow is not

distributed evenly in one day, but occurs intensively

in rush hour. Thus, carrying capacity of station throat

is affected by train arrival flow distribution. And for

getting the advantage of the simulator, it was

employed the number of trains that can wait on each

station.

2.3 Output

Based on the proposed model, the trains movement

simulation is carried out, and the maximum railway

carrying capacity is calculated. Since we had filled in

all the necessary data: the track length, the track

object, the location of the switch, the number of tracks

on the switch, the amount of trains, which are

expected at a separate point, the braking, the time

forward, backward and stationary intervals, the

simulator does the following calculations: (Fig. 2)

 the throughput

 capacity without passengers

 the required line capacity

 reserve train pairs

 the reserve capacity

 the carrying capacity of the railway

The simulator produces a number of calculations

which is shown in the following figure 2.

Figure 2: Output Data.

In case of low throughput on this separate point

the line is highlighted to red. This makes it visually

clear to become work on this part of the way.

The simulator supports the following types of tasks:

 Determining the throughput and carrying

capacity of the railway

 Analyzing the capacity of lines and stations

 Determining the required throughput

 Determining the average weight of the train

The following figure 3 shows how the simulation

tool works.

Cloud Railroad Simulator

661

Figure 3: Animation of the simulation.

In this case we have length of way equal to 136,5

and six separate points, and all way is a single track.

Trains run according to the timetable on a railway

network. During the simulation, simulator calculates

train movements under the input data. After a

simulation run, we can analyse and display the

resulting data in the form of table and animation

Simulator handles single track simulation runs as

well as two-line simulation runs depending on input

data.

Using simulator, it is possible to identify separate

points at which the throughput and carrying capacity

are reduced, thereby helping to plan the number,

speed and weight of trains, the optimal departure

schedule and station interval.

Also using the simulator, you can define separate

points where the construction of double-track line

will significantly increase the overall throughput and

carrying capacity.

The simulator has already been used for

Kazakhstan Railways. Thereby they have done a

number of calculations which increased the

throughput and carrying capacity.

3 CONCLUSIONS

Cloud simulator is an efficient and effective railroad

program. It has been used successfully in Kazakhstan

railways. The program use Python web framework

Django, Bootstrap, JQuery and published on the

cloud platform Pythonanywhere with a full Python

environment. All entered and computed data is stored

on PostgreSQL database server, object-relational

database management system. Therefore, it is

recommended to use for railway simulation because

it cover a possible output data that can be used in

decision making process.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This research is partially funded by national grant No

BR05236644.

REFERENCES

Bekmagambetov M., Smirnov C., 2005, Moore, R., Lopes,

J., 1999. The book Transport System of Republic of

Kazakhstan.

Bakibayev T., Bekmagambetova G., Turarbek A., 2015.

Reversible Express Bus Lanes Simulation Software.

Song Han, Yixiang Yue, Leishan Zhou, 2014. Paper

templates. In IEEE 17th International Conference on

Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITSC). Carrying

capacity of railway station by microscopic simulation

method.

Owen Wong, Mervyn Rosser, 2000, Improving system

performance for a single line Railway with passing

loops.

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662