IF articles

Summary - This article describes the activities carried out for the development of a support system for the fore- casting of demand and the planning of HS railway services (lines, timetables and fares), on behalf of the company NTV, by the Associazione Temporanea di Imprese (here- inafter ATI) formed by the companies Net Engineering S.p.A. (leader), TSC Transportation System Consulting S.r.l. and Gruppo Clas S.r.l. (members).
The approach used was that of system engineering based on the identification of socio-economic and technical components that characterise the mobility system in a giv- en area and on the simulation of interactions between these components through a set of highly sophisticated mathe- matical models.
The models system implemented (DSS), developed com- pletely from scratch(1) allows forecasting ex-ante how the balance of a transportation system changes as one or more key components vary.
In the case study the aim was to forecast the future dis- tribution of demand between the various transport modes (road, air, traditional and HS trains) as a result of the entry of a new rail service in order to support the economic and financial feasibility assessments of the investment.