Llobregat-Anoia timetable robustness

The Llobregat–Anoia Line is a metre gauge railway line linking Barcelona with the Baix Llobregat, Bages and Anoia regions in Catalonia. This 138km line combines the Metro service in the inner Barcelona city with regional and freight services. The Ferrocarrils de la Generalitat de Catalunya (FGC) is introducing the FAP Digital safety system to increase safety of operations and tasked trenolab with testing the potential effects on network performance.

The FAP Digital provides a protection against overspeed risk using a continuous monitoring along the line instead of the existing analogical system monitoring speed at fixed points. The system also defines a more conservative braking curve which could potentially lead to longer running times. As part of the FAP Digital implementation project trenolab evaluated the robustness of current operations simulating the new safety system. This task was performed considering current input delays (stochastic simulation) and evaluating the timetable recovery time simulating failures on critical switches.