The SafeCap Project on Railway Safety Verification and Capacity Simulation

This paper introduces the UK SafeCap project on Overcoming the railway capacity challenges without undermining rail network safety. The focus of the project has been on developing methods and tools that will allow signalling engineers to model railway nodes (junctions and stations), to verify their safety and to analyse the node capacity provided the safety is ensured. The paper outlines the project approach, its objectives and the outcomes. The main result of the project is the development of a method for analysing railway safety and capacity in a unified way and the Eclipse-based SafeCap platform supporting this method. The platform is extendable with the new modelling plugins and is openly available at SourceForge. It has been developed in a close cooperation with industry and thoroughly evaluated using the layouts of several UK railway stations.