Simulation backbone for gaming simulation in railways: A case study

The Dutch railway is one of the world´s busiest. Innovative measures are necessary, to cope with the projected growth of transport demand. The impact of innovations brings uncertainty to the decision makers and experts involved. To reduce this uncertainty, ProRail, the Dutch rail infrastructure manager, has introduced a combined gaming and simulating approach, called the Railway Gaming Suite. The development started by coupling existing simulators using High Level Architecture. It should lead to a flexible and scalable backbone to support the gaming and simulation approach. This way, the traditional application field of the simulators is extended from supporting capacity analysis, timetable robustness and construction to supporting decision making and enhancing insight in the operations. The current Railway Gaming Suite consists of three simulators. The aim of this paper is to give an overview of the approach and the underlying toolbox, applied to the concrete case: the Den Bosch station reconstruction.