A Hybrid Approach for Railway Yard Network Modelling: From Yard Layout Design Drawing to Topology

ABSTRACT

The railway yard network model is a digital representation of railway infrastructure geometry and track topology that provides essential input for the simulation, planning, and optimization of yard operations. Existing studies have developed yard models with different levels of detail and through manual, semi‐automated, and automated workflows. However, transforming primitive‐level geometric information into a structured representation containing infrastructure attributes, selected boundaries, connectivity, and local movement constraints remains an important model‐construction task. This study proposes a hybrid approach that constructs railway yard network models from geometric primitives and their spatial relationships. In the current implementation, these primitives are extracted from railway yard design drawings in DXF format. The approach integrates infrastructure geometry modelling (IGM) and topology modelling (TM) through infrastructure‐element detection, classification, turnout‐configuration identification, turnout segmentation and movement‐constrained topology construction. Experimental validation at a large‐scale railway station demonstrates that the proposed approach derives the geometric attributes of railway infrastructure elements in approximately 0.46 s and constructs the corresponding track topology in approximately 0.5 s. The topology‐validation experiment further shows that the tabu list excludes routine continuous transitions that are incompatible with the identified turnout configurations, thereby avoiding paths that would otherwise be treated as ordinary continuous routes on the basis of physical connectivity alone. The proposed approach thus contributes to railway intelligent transportation systems by providing an automated information‐processing and data‐integration layer that converts source‐level geometric information into a machine‐readable infrastructure representation for downstream yard‐operation simulation, route planning, capacity assessment and traffic‐management applications.