railyard simulation

[Vinay Mehendiratta]

Hello,

has anybody tried to simulate railroad yard or mainline operations using Flexsim ? flat switching , hump, or intermodal ?

We are currently using Flexsim to do what i described above but would like to know if someone else has made efforts.

has someone tried to compare Flexsim vs Arena for this kind of simulation ?

thanks,
Vinay

[Lolke Koopmans]

Hello Vinay,
At TALUMIS we have done several projects with railyard simulation. And I know Ben at Flexsim has done such a project as well.
In our last model the movements of the trains are rather detailed. After all these projects there is quite some experience in rail-simulation. I worked with some of the other simulation packages and I think Flexsim gives the best possibilities to simulate the train-movements.

Regards,
Lolke

[Anthony Johnson]

Lolke,
I'm curious to know how you implemented the rail movements for your models. Did you use the standard TaskExecuter travel mechanism, or did you implement your own travel mechanism, like we did using kinematics with the node network as a geometric backbone?
Anthony

[Lolke Koopmans]

My implementation is very much like yours. I have a table with the coordinates of the nodes. I use the network nodes to visualize this and kinematics to have the train traveling along the nodes.
Each waggon has its own kinematics. I think this differs from your implementation?

[Anthony Johnson]

Yeah, in our implementation, each train has a kinematic, you create a train association by adding cars to the train, and each car has an offset from the origin of the kinematic, or the head of the train. But essentially it sounds pretty similar to what you guys implemented.

[Vinay Mehendiratta]

Lolke,

is it possible to have a look at your model(s) ? video may be ?

i can check and perhaps demo our flexsim based model. i would have to get permission.

you mentioned trying various packages for railroad simulation. what are those packages ? what are the advantages /disadvantages that Flexsim has over these packages ? i like Flexsim as well so i tend to agree with you personally.
thanks,
Vinay

[Lolke Koopmans]

yeah, I think I can make some videos of our projects. I will have to ask my customer as well. I am also thinking of writing a case about the projects. I will keep you informed.
I have not actually done rail-simulations in other packages. But I worked with Enterprise Dynamics a lot. And I know it would be much harder to develop the same models in ED.

regards,
Lolke

[Cliff King]

As soon as we have some time (next year most likely...), we will wrap up the Rail API into a robust user library, and post it on the forum for everyone to use. It will provide basic funtionality for coupling, decoupling, and moving rail cars along a track system created with standard networknodes. It includes methods for allocating, deallocating and switching rail track dynamically.