Towards optimal railway track utilization based on societal benefit

Abstract: Infrastructure managers in railway systems are striving to have as efficient track utilization as possible. There are no unanimous interpretation of efficiency in terms of track utilization, but the aim of the Swedish Transport Administration is to allocate track capacity such that societal benefit is maximized. This means that the tracks should be used by as much traffic as possible and by traffic that provides as much benefit for the society as possible.To allocate track capacity such that the track utilization is optimal would be an easy task if the track capacity were not a scarce resource. Today, many train operators share railway network and there are cases when two or more operators want to use the same track capacity at the same time. The infrastructure manager must then make priorities and reject some operators, and the question is which operators to reject. The guiding principle is to grant the operators that provide the highest societal benefit access to the tracks. However, the question would then change into how to know which operator that provides the highest societal benefit.In this thesis, the societal benefit of publicly subsidized traffic is estimated using social cost-benefit analysis. Mathematical models and methods are developed for quantifying and computing the number of departures for the publicly subsidized traffic and their distribution in time, i.e. a train timetable, that provides the maximal societal benefit in a social cost-benefit analysis setting. The societal benefit of commercial traffic is estimated using the market value for their requested train timetables. The market value is set using dynamic pricing. A suggestion of a dynamic pricing process that can be used in the train timetabling process is described. Mathematical models and methods for calculating the supply and demand of a track access request are developed and tested, which enables the use of a dynamic pricing process on track capacity