Towards a hybrid mesoscopic-microscopic railway simulation model

Mesoscopic and microscopic simulation models of railway systems hold a fundamental role in supporting designing phases of both infrastructure components and railway operation strategies. Limits of such approaches regard the scarce accuracy in results of the former, which are unable to describe transient train dynamics, and the computational inefficiency of the latter which prevent their application to large-sized networks or probabilistic analyses. In this paper a microscopic and a mesoscopic “own built” railway simulation models are firstly introduced. Their application to a common case study and a comparison between the corresponding outputs and computing performances is then presented. Results comparison show that the dynamical integration of the approaches would overcome the respective limits improving both the range of possible applications and the accuracy of results.