The development of a railway dynamics modelling and simulation package to cater for current industrial trends

Abstract

A number of proprietary software packages, focusing on predicting the dynamic behaviour of railway vehicles, have been developed over the last 30 years. These packages have gained wide acceptance within the industry, since they shorten the design cycle and avoid the need for extensive field testing. The current trend within the industry to move towards to the development of vehicles with mechatronic systems and non-standard vehicles, has highlighted the shortcomings of many of these packages. Parallel developments in the software industry have led to the adoption of object-oriented and knowledge-based techniques. These techniques aid the human thought process; it is convenient to think of a railway vehicle as an assembly of many objects: bogies, axles, etc. This paper describes the development of a new software tool, based upon these techniques, which is intended to highlight many of these advantages.