Multiple Regimes in Operation of the Swiss Railway System and Potential Influences on Power Load

Abstract

The analysis of the noise of a system is often an effective way for obtaining information about its internal dynamics. In this article, an analysis of the variance of the noise on the power load curve of the Swiss railway system guides us towards the detection of a multimodality in the distribution of punctualities. This multimodality is regarded as a strong indicator for a dynamics with multiple, possibly self-organized, regimes. The presence of multiple regimes in the dynamics is of relevance for the design of control strategies. Based on information about the operation of the Swiss regular interval time table, we suggest and apply a simple way for identifying the part of the load signal that can be regarded as noise and we demonstrate the use of Hartigan's dip test for the identification of multimodalities in the distribution of random variables.