978-1-4244-5791-5/09/$25.00 © 2009 IEEE Abstract—In the forthcoming decade the capacity of railway passenger transport on the major Dutch corridors has to accommodate a 50% growth. ProRail, The Netherlands’ railway manager aims to enable a high-frequency schedule by the year 2012. To safeguard the quality and manageability of traffic, a new steering and control concept has been worked out. The current paper reports on a pre-field test of the concept to identify its usefulness and to come to real-world procedures. The test was in the format of a gaming simulation session involving train drivers, train dispatchers and network controllers. The results show that the control and steering concept has potential, and should be worked out for both the train dispatcher and network controller level. Critical success factors on the train dispatcher level have been identified, which include simple information representation, reduction of the number of telephone calls and an update of the communication protocols with the network controllers. I. INTRODUCTION The Dutch railway sector will face a massive growth of transport demand in the forthcoming decade. This growth is both expected in passenger and in freight transport. Currently, the Dutch railway network is one of the most densely used networks in the world, approaching its maximum capacity given the current infrastructure and control mechanisms. The projected increase in demand requires a step-change in both the physical and control aspects of the railways. ProRail, The Netherlands’ railway manager, formulated an ambitious program, called ‘Room on the Railways” (Ruimte op de Rails, in Dutch) to increase the number of trains on the network by 50% before the year 2020. One of the major components of this program is the plan for high-frequency passenger trains on the major corridors. Currently there are (on average) 4 intercity, 2 to 4 local and 1 or 2 freight trains per hour on the major corridors. This should increase to 6 intercity, 6 local and 2 freight trains before 2012. This new frequency of trains is often called ‘untimetabled travelling” as the passenger can just go to a station without checking departure times: the next train will be there soon. The official title of the schedule is High Frequency Train Transport. Manuscript received September 27, 2009. The research presented in this paper was conducted within the framework of the Next Generation Infrastructures (NGI) program (www.nginfra.nl ). The research was funded by ProRail, NGI and TU-Delft. S.A. Meijer is assistant professor at Delft University of Technology, Jaffalaan 5, 2628 BX, Delft, The Netherlands (phone: +31 15 2783441; e-mail: sebastiaan.meijer@tudelft.nl). P. van der Kracht, J.J.W. van Luipen and A.A.M. Schaafsma are with ProRail, Moreelsepark 3, 3511 EP Utrecht, The Netherlands (e-mail: peter.vanderkracht / jelle.vanluipen / alfons.schaafsma@prorail.nl). The projected increase of capacity cannot be achieved by building new infrastructure alone: the costs for the complete program would be around 9 billion euro, and the time for procedures and construction would frustrate the transport demand for years. ProRail has taken up the challenge to achieve the goals with only half of this budget by combining strategic choices for new infrastructure with new control and management solutions. This paper concentrates on the train traffic control and steering procedures for the busiest train corridor of The Netherlands: Amsterdam-Eindhoven, also known as the A2-corridor, named after the highway that follows the same trajectory. II. RESEARCH PROBLEM ProRail has assigned a project team to come to new control and steering procedures that suite the future reality of high-frequency passenger trains. The challenge of this project team was to come up with new concepts that would both be supported by train dispatchers and network controllers, and would yield a stable, controllable control and routing operation when put into place. There are multiple levels of control on the Dutch railways, shown in Table I. This challenge was open and approached with a general view in three sessions of concept experts, network controllers and train dispatchers. These sessions had the character of discussions in which new ideas were generated and challenged. After three sessions a theoretical concept, titled ‘slot management and time windows’ emerged and was worked out for field tests. Slot management is concerned with the bandwidth in which a train should arrive and depart on a major junction station. Management of slots makes it possible for passengers to catch connecting services, but also to manage personnel, trains and services. The difference with current scheduling procedures is that a few minutes of delay are accounted for in the planning, and even more that the relation of multiple services that should arrive in one slot are managed together. To arrive in a slot, a train has a certain time window for each of the nodes and signs that it will pass along the way towards the junction. The time window shows whether the train will make the slot (green status), should hurry up (yellow status) or will definitely not make it (red status). The thought behind the status colors is that yellow trains have to be managed to make it. The red ones should be taken care of, as they will not depart in the slot from the major junction station [1]. In the meanwhile the Netherlands Railways (NS), the operator of passenger trains on the major corridors, decided to do a field test in week 36 of 2009. For a full week the existing train schedule between Amsterdam and Eindhoven would be Studying a control concept for high-frequency train transport Sebastiaan A. Meijer, Peter van der Kracht, Jelle J.W. van Luipen and Alfons A.M. Schaafsma