The capacity analysis tool Kaban aims at being efficient for examining if planned infrastructure meets the expected need for railway capacity. Infrastructure, safety rules, signalling and traffic are all modelled in great detail in Kaban and hence the tool is a useful support for signalling design. The tool is also useful for finding out which routing and what train order suits existing or planned track layout. The idea of Kaban is that traffic patterns can be modelled as discrete event systems, with the minimum cycle time as a capacity measure. This measure answers the question if a certain timetable is possible at a station and tells how much buffer time there is. Kaban also presents results on what is critical for the capacity, aiming at explaining how to adjust to increase capacity. The GUI of Kaban displays the infrastructure and train paths and takes care of the user interaction. The development of Kaban is supported by the Swedish Transport Administration (Trafikverket).
The paper was presented at the COMPRAIL conference in Beijing 2010 (Computers in Railways XII: Computer System Design and Operation in Railways and Other Transit Systems), but published in this conference proceedings for administrative reasons (Computational Methods and Experimental Measurements)