System-based Vulnerability Measures for Railway Systems

Abstract

The issue of disruptions in railway systems attracts a growing attention due to its severity to the society. Mitigation strategies are proposed from different perspectives to reduce the system vulnerability resulting by disruptions. However, due to financial limitations, it is not realistic to realize all strategies in the real world. Thus, it is necessary to establish a model based on which the system vulnerability can be measured and the mitigation strategy can be evaluated. In this paper, such a model is constructed by applying a Monte Carlo simulation based on the historical disruption data of railways in the Netherlands. Based on this model, we first construct a baseline scenario that is capable of reflecting the current disruption practice and calculate the top ten vulnerable tracks with the indicator of yearly disruption duration from this scenario. Next, we propose mitigation strategies towards each of the top ten vulnerable tracks of different magnitudes, and construct the mitigation scenarios according to the strategies. Finally, comparison between the baseline scenario and each of the mitigation scenarios is performed with the purpose of strategy evaluation.