1. BRAVE University of Birmingham Railway Virtual Environment Background
Universities and businesses are developing and evolving novel concepts in modern railways in order to achieve greater punctuality, resilience and robustness in scheduled train operations. These include advanced signalling technologies, driver advisory and traffic management automation systems.
BRAVE is a suite of software tools featuring a microscopic synchronous core. It is a virtual environment that can be used for teaching railway principles and for research purposes, such as prototyping, concept development, performance analysis and benchmarking.
Fig 1 BRAVE rolling stock editor
Fig 2 BRAVE operations simulation from Selly Oak to Birmingham New Street
Features of BRAVE
Accurate geographical modelling;
Network sizes in excess of 100,000 nodes (Greater London overground);
Fast simulation speeds, rewind and restart;
Configurable signalling featuring a range of traffic management algorithms: ARS pairwise, brute force, decision tree based, first-come-first-served, ant colony optimisation, tabu-search, simulated annealing, genetic algorithms [1], DeJRM mixed integer programming [2];
Configurable driver behaviour: coasting, target scanning of speeds and timings;
Incident injection – disrupting scenarios;
Scriptable interlocking model, featuring advanced signalling concepts:
Route setting, release and cancellation for different classes of routes;
Approach release, approach lock, overlap release, overlap swinging, flank protection, equipment timing, ETCS in-cab signalling.
References
[1] Fan, B., 2012, Railway traffic rescheduling approaches to minimise delays in disturbed conditions, Ph.D, University of Birmingham.
[2] Chen, L., 2012, Real time traffic management in junction areas and bottleneck sections on mainline railways, Ph.D, University of Birmingham.
[3] Nicholson, G., 2013, Visualisation of train delay impact data in order to improve decision making, University of Birmingham.
[4] Wen, T., 2014, Wireless communication optimising in CBTC systems: 3 month report, Ph.D, University of Birmingham.

2. ‘Human in the loop’ simulation
Working cab with throttle/brake controller and touchscreens;
Simulation of different driving and weather conditions;
Signaller working positions featuring ‘clickable’ entry-exit route setting;
Control centre situation display.
Fig 3 Driver working position
Fig 4 Control centre situation display (Birmingham New Street)
State-of-the-art post processing
RAP post-processing of simulation results;
Visualisation of network performance;
KPI analysis of resilience and delays;
Analysis of passenger connections, journey times, energy usage, transport volume, resource usage.
Fig 5 RAP post-processing analysis tool [3]
Integrated, feature rich, model editor.
Database editor featuring:
Full visibility of network, timetable and rolling stock models;
Full export capability for data and trajectory graphs in CSV format;
Import and export to a number of formats;
Edit train performance, timetable, infrastructure and interlocking.
Fig 6 Part of the Greater London geographical model
Additional Components
Power network solver simulation of AC or DC current flows. Reduces tractive effort available to the train in high-demand situations;
Radio communication simulation for in-cab signalling. Potential failure due to shadowing effect of obstacles and free pass loss.
Fig 7 Railway radio communications simulation [4]
Dr. David Kirkwood
Dr. Lei Chen Professor Clive Roberts
Dr. Gemma Nicholson Professor Felix Schmid
Fig 8 BRAVE screenshots