Criteria for a Steady-State Initialization in a Large-Scale Railroad Network Simulation

Computer simulation is well accepted as a technique to support the planning of transportation systems and analyses of infrastructure capacity. With the advance of computer simulation technologies, it requires more and more precise results from the simulators. As a critical step of a simulation experiment, the initialization process and the initial state of the simulator has a profound impact on the simulation process and the accuracy of the simulation experiment. To satisfy the need of providing a more realistic initial state for the simulation, a steady-state initialization process is preferred to the traditional transient process. Based on the railroad transportation system this paper proposed a model structure for the initialization process and the criteria set for checking whether a steady-state condition is reached during the initialization.