Holistic planning for economical train operation
From planning to real-time operations in a single solution.
Reliable rail operations depend on the coordination of planning, timetabling and operations. Photo: Adobe Stock
With the DELMIA Quintiq planning solution, Dassault Systèmes supports railway operators in managing complex networks in an interoperable and cost-efficient way. The software combines long-term infrastructure and scheduling decisions with daily operations and the ability to react to disruptions in real time in a shared environment.
The DELMIA rail planning solution is an in-memory platform specifically designed to manage personnel, fleets, network capacity and assets such as terminals and marshalling yards in a single environment. It covers various time horizons - from strategic investments and medium-term timetable development to day-to-day operations and incident management - and turns planning, timetabling and operations into an end-to-end process that creates transparency and reduces costs. For operators, this means that timetables, rotation and duty schedules, including possessions for maintenance, can be created consistently and checked against each other automatically.
A national freight and network operator in the Asia-Pacific region, which has digitised its long-term master train planning with DELMIA Quintiq, shows what this looks like in practice. New versions of this master plan, which used to require several weeks of preparation, are now created in just a few hours - including a complete cost assessment during creation, rather than afterwards. On this basis, the operator can compare variants more quickly, recognise bottlenecks at an early stage and make fact-based investment decisions. Further project phases to deepen the integration are already in preparation.
A major rail freight operator in southern Africa is pursuing a similar approach and is initially focusing on long-term master train planning as a foundation for further integration. However, the project must develop in parallel with a far-reaching railway reform in which the administration of infrastructure and transport services are separated and train paths are being allocated at an international level. It is precisely in this environment that it is particularly beneficial to have a flexible planning platform that can accommodate new roles, responsibilities and data flows without the need to reorganise the entire system landscape.
DELMIA Quintiq combines time-based simulation, automatic propagation and mathematical optimisation and has been one of the pioneers of ‘advanced AI’ in planning for years. For the rail industry, the DELMIA Rail Planner portfolio bundles all relevant modules - from personnel and fleet planning to network and traffic planning and maintenance management - on a common technology platform. This results in end-to-end processes that are interoperable and enable operators to make better use of their capacity, stabilise service quality and meet regulatory requirements for efficiency, sustainability and resilience.
Dassault Systèmes
Hall 2.1 | 855