The importance of a mobility system based on railway technology as the backbone of public transport is now widely acknowledged. Indeed, rail systems are green, high performing, smart and able to ensure a high degree of safety. Therefore, modal split should be steered towards rail transport by increasing the attractiveness of this transport mode. In this context, a key element is represented by the timetabling design phase, which must aim to guarantee an appropriate degree of robustness of rail operations in order to ensure a high degree of system reliability and increase service quality. A crucial factor in the task of timetabling entails evaluating dwell times at stations. The innovative feature of this paper is the analytical definition of dwell times as flow dependent. Our proposal is based on estimating dwell times according to the crowding level at platforms and related interaction between passengers and the rail service in terms of user behaviour when a train arrives. An application in the case of a real metro system is provided in order to show the feasibility of the proposed approach.

The safety and the correctness of signaling system not only relate to the safety and efficiency of the rail transit operation, but also link with the life safety of passengers. In order to guarantee the safety of a signaling system for metro, the safety certificate for the trial operation with carrying passengers must be obtained. In this paper, a suitable safety management and signaling system integration model are explored according to the CENELEC standards and applied in China. With taking account of the strict safety requirements for the Communication-Based Train Control (CBTC) system, a safety assurance and assessment method based on safety verification and validation process was put forward. This method was applied in every phase of the CBTC system development life cycle to monitor and control each activity in the life cycle and to review each document in system development process. At the same time, this method is also used to ensure the traceability of relevant documents and to test all the functions of the whole system sufficiently and completely. So that the safety operation of train control system can be ensured. Up to now, the independently developed CBTC system with the safety management had been applied in many urban rail transit lines of Beijing, such as Yizhuang Line, Changping Line, Line No. 14, and Line No. 7. The CBTC signaling systems of these projects have been authorized by the safety certification from a third party, e.g., Lloyd Register which is a British company and famous for the safety verification and validation process.

There are 32 cities around the world with automated metro systems in operation. The majority of these are located in Europe (13) and Asia (14) but none so far in Australia. However, the picture is changing in 2019 when the first stage of the ‘Sydney Metro’ starts its operation on the North West link in Sydney, New South Wales, Australia. The automated train is planned to be used safely without human interaction, thus reducing significantly the labour input in the provision of service. Although the proposal for a fully automated system came late in the planning phase of the Sydney Metro project, it appears that, from a technical point of view, the project is clear and well planned. However, providing information to Sydneysiders and understanding their attitudes towards automation has received no consideration. Moreover, how the public perceive these changes and their attitudes to aspects of the new system, including driverless trains, may well be crucial in properly positioning and marketing the new services to ensure the expected patronage. This paper aims to fill this gap by investigating public opinion of the new Sydney Metro service by undertaking a research on people’s perceptions of a driverless train as well as their attitudes to the new transport system and public transport more generally

The optimal design of the walkway at an urban rail transit station is a vital issue. The Transit Capacity and Quality of Service Manual (TCQSM) TCRP-100 report for the design of urban rail transit station walkway and the existing design models neglect the important factors such as randomness in the passenger arrival rate, randomness and state-dependent service time of the walkway and blocking phenomenon when the passenger flow demand exceeds the walkway capacity. There obviously exists a need to develop a design approach that overcomes these shortcomings. For this purpose, this paper details a simulation-based optimization approach that provides width design through automatic reconfiguration of walkway width during the simulation–optimization process based on phase-type (PH) distribution. The integrated PH/PH(n)/C/C discrete-event simulation (DES) model and optimization method that uses the genetic algorithm (GA) work together concurrently to obtain optimized (design) widths for different passenger flow and level of service (LOS) The numerical experiments are conducted to compare the proposed model with the existing design methods. It reveals that: (1) The width obtained by our proposed model is higher than the existing width design models; (2) when squared coefficient of variation of passenger arrival interval increases, the walkway width increases more for our proposed model than the existing design models; (3) when the arrival rate increases, the walkway width of our proposed model increases faster than the existing design models; (4) the increase in the length of walkway has no significant effect on the walkway width.