Schematic representation of the geographical railway network used by the Swedish Transport Administration

Abstract: Today, one of the needs of the railway information systems is sharing the precise and exact data among varieties of stakeholders. In addition, efficient use of Geographical Information Systems (GIS) encourages the railways administrations to centralize their data and prepare an information model whose purpose is to reduce the demands associated with the transformation of the data. One such reduction of data handling is to be able to extract both geographical and schematic representations from the same database. Currently, one difficulty which encountered by the Swedish Transport Administration (Trafikverket) is that different representations (geographical and schematic) have to be updated separately is imposing larger costs and they have a possibility of inconsistency in accuracy of these two representations. However, when the information model was initially developed, the schematic representation was not a requirement; subsequently, there might be some unresolved issues associated with updating these representations. This research is aimed to examine ArcGIS Schematics extension for automatically generating the schematic map from a geographical database that is suitable for railway applications. In addition, it wants to evaluate the data in the current database provided by the Trafikverket for creating the schematic maps as a suitable input for ArcGIS Schematics. The results show that the ArcGIS Schematics extension can automatically creates the schematic map for railway networks, and it makes the situations much easier for Trafikverket that currently they create the schematic maps manually. In addition, the evaluation of current data uses in Trafikverket shows that the ArcGIS Schematics extension is matched with their data, but some improvements must be done on their data.