User's behaviour simulation of intercity rail service choices

Abstract

This paper presents a system of within-day dynamic railway service choice and assignment models which is used as the modelling basis for a large Decision Support System for the operational planning of rail services named System for the Analysis and Simulation of Marketing (SASM), recently developed by the Italian Railways Company. The first part of the paper describes the demand model, based on a tree-logit service/run/class choice model explicitly taking into account desired departure/arrival time, the supply model based on a diachronic (spatio–temporal) network representation of scheduled services and the assignment model which is a Stochastic Network Loading (SNL) model based on explicit (diachronic) path enumeration. The second part of the paper describes shortly the basic functionalities of the DSS and some applications of the model system to the Turin–Venice railway corridor.