BRAVE Background Universities and businesses are developing and evolving novel concepts in modern railways in order to achieve greater punctuality, resilience and robustness in scheduled train operations. These include advanced signalling technologies, driver advisory and traffic management automation systems. BRAVE is a suite of software tools featuring a microscopic synchronous core. It is a virtual environment that can be used for teaching railway principles and for research purposes, such as prototyping, concept development, performance analysis and benchmarking. • Configurable driver behaviour: coasting, target scanning of speeds and timings; • Incident injection – disrupting scenarios; • Scriptable interlocking model, featuring advanced signalling concepts: o Route setting, release and cancellation for different classes of routes; o Approach release, approach lock, overlap release, overlap swinging, flank protection, equipment timing, ETCS in-cab signalling. [1] Fan, B., 2012, Railway traffic rescheduling approaches to minimise delays in disturbed conditions, Ph.D, University of Birmingham. [2] Chen, L., 2012, Real time traffic management in junction areas and bottleneck sections on mainline railways, Ph.D, University of Birmingham. [3] Nicholson, G., 2013, Visualisation of train delay impact data in order to improve decision making, University of Birmingham. [4] Wen, T., 2014, Wireless communication optimising in CBTC systems: 3 month report, Ph.D, University of Birmingham. Fig 2 BRAVE operations simulation from Selly Oak to Birmingham New Street Referenc es Features of BRAVE • Accurate geographical modelling; • Network sizes in excess of 100,000 nodes (Greater London overground); • Fast simulation speeds, rewind and restart; • Configurable signalling featuring a range of traffic management algorithms: ARS pairwise, brute force, decision tree based, first-come-first- served, ant colony optimisation, tabu-search, simulated annealing, genetic algorithms [1], DeJRM mixed integer programming [2]; Fig 1 BRAVE rolling stock editor University of Birmingham Railway Virtual Environment