The paper "Approximation of service systems for determining the performance of railway infrastructure in stations" by Tamme Emunds and Nils Nießen has received the Best Paper Award from the program committee of the International Railway Symposium Aachen (IRSA) 2025.

The paper presents a method for performance analysis of railway stations in which arrival and departure processes are modeled together with the dwell processes within a single combined queueing system. The proposed approximation enables, for the first time, to derive timetable-independent performance indicators for large railway stations.

Three additional papers were also honored with the Best Paper Award. Short versions of the awarded contributions are published in the May 2026 issue of Eisenbahntechnische Rundschau.

This summer term, Dr. Andreas Kaldenbach will again give his lecture "Ausgewählte Aspekte des Schienenbahnwesens". This course will be held in the German language. This year, the focus will be on the design of train route management in Germany. Further information can be found in the linked document (in german).

Marking the project's completion, a final meeting of all project partners took place in Berlin on February the 24th, 2026. As part of the project, commissioned by the Federal Ministry for Research, Technology and Space (Förderlinie "Anwender - Innovativ: Forschung für die zivile Sicherheit II"), the feasibility of additional security measures at stations in the German mainline rail network was assessed. The main focus was on access control systems and platform barriers, as commonly used in metro systems worldwide. Further information on the BMFTR's security research program can be found here.

After breakfast together and some cool drinks, we headed to the party at C.A.R.L..

We wish you all a happy and foolish carnival season!

Mr. Felix Lampe passed his doctoral examination on January 29th, 2026. The title of his dissertation is: "Quality assessment and forecasting of the condition development of railway station infrastructure".
The Institute of Transport Science congratulates quite cordially!

We are pleased to announce that the IRSA 2025 conference proceedings have now been published and are available online.
We hope you enjoy reading them!

Please save the date for the next IRSA conference: November 24-25, 2027, in Aachen

Our colleague Tamme Emunds spent the month of November on a research visit at the Institute for Mobility at KU Leuven. We sincerely thank the team of Prof. Pieter Vansteenwegen for their warm welcome and inspiring collaboration. We are eager to hear about the impressions and ideas Mr. Emunds will share with us from his stay.

The Institute for Mobility, led by Prof. Vansteenwegen, is dedicated to solving complex logistical challenges, particularly planning and optimization problems in transport systems.

We would also like to extend our heartfelt thanks to the UnRAVeL Graduate School for supporting this research stay.

On November 21, seventeen graduates of RWTH Aachen University were honored with the Friedrich Wilhelm Award for their outstanding achievements. Among them, our colleague Alexandra Benz received the prize for her master's thesis titled "Development of a Uniform Assessment Standard for Evaluating the Operational Quality of Railway Lines."
In addition, she was invited to speak about her experiences during the master's thesis as part of an on-stage interview with RWTH Rector Ulrich Rüdiger. Prof. Nießen, who supervised her thesis, was also invited to join the interview and provided fascinating insights into VIA's research focus areas.
We warmly congratulate her on this exceptional achievement!