Evaluation of the Implementation Effect and the Transportation Impact of the Earthquake Early Warning for Railways

Abstract

Earthquake early warning systems are in operation on Shinkansen and other trains to quickly suspend or decelerate running trains in the occurrence of earthquakes. When new warning methods were introduced to improve the performance of the system, preliminary evaluation of the overall system's warning issuance for the target railway lines had not been adequately implemented. Therefor we have developed a simulator that can evaluate the actual operation of an earthquake early warning system for train operation during an earthquake. The simulator can set up warning methods and operating conditions to be used in the system and input seismic waveform data recorded at earthquake observation sites to quantitatively evaluate the implementation effect and the transportation impact. Using the developed simulator, we compared warning methods for large earthquakes in the past and simulated the warning issuance characteristics. Simulation results show that, in the case of an inland earthquake, the method under development can issue an earlier warning at the earthquake observation site closest to the epicenter than the conventional method. The output of the simulator, which can quantitatively evaluate the relationship implementation effects and transportation impacts, can be used by railway operators to make decisions on the introduction of new earthquake early warning methods.