The development of a railway dynamics modelling and simulation package to cater for current industrial trends

A number of proprietary software packages, focusing on predicting the dynam ic behaviour of railway vehicles, have been developed over the last 30 year s. These packages have gained wide acceptance within the industry, since th ey shorten the design cycle and avoid the need for extensive field testing. The current trend within the industry to move towards to the development o f vehicles with mechatronic systems and non-standard vehicles, has highligh ted the shortcomings of many of these packages. Parallel developments in th e software industry have led to the adoption of object-oriented and knowled ge-based techniques. These techniques aid the human thought process; it is convenient to think of a railway vehicle as an assembly of many objects: bo gies, axles, etc. This paper describes the development of a new software to ol, based upon these techniques, which is intended to highlight many of the se advantages.