This looks like a serious tool for real professionals to use. Cool! I wish they had some screenshots or videos of the process.

In the meantime, if anyone's looking for gamified railroad-building (just for fun), check out:

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1124180/Rail_Route/

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1134710/NIMBY_Rails/

https://store.steampowered.com/app/503940/Railway_Empire/

Or several more: https://github.com/arcataroger/awesome-engineering-games/tre...

This tool was the subject of a FOSDEM talk this year, which is available as a video on FOSDEM’s website: https://fosdem.org/2024/schedule/event/fosdem-2024-2052-open...

Kudos for the EU (and as often, also here: France!) for supporting such initiatives to open up niche, often-invisible areas of a market to create new grounds for innovation and disruption!

It doesn't work out in all cases, but in areas where it does it silently moves society forward!

I would have felt a tad better if such tool had originated in Switzerland rather than France.

The railway system in Switzerland is far, far more reliable, far more central to the Swiss economy and proportionally (Switzerland is smaller than France) services much more of the country in terms of both geographical reach and service frequency.

But ... credit where credit is due, kudos indeed to the Frenchies for building and open sourcing something like this, I would love to see a video of it in use.

[EDIT]: I skimmed through the documentation, and I haven't found anything pertaining to monte carlo simulation of a complex railway system subject to external perturbations, as in: throw a bunch of unexpected events (accidents, breakdowns, blockages, late trains from a neighboring country entering the system, etc...) and see how well the whole network's efficiency holds under such disturbances. Maybe I am misunderstanding the purpose of the system.

[EDIT 2]: OK, found something. Such a "how well does the network do under perturbation" is not part of the feature set yet but seemed to be in the cards. From [1], in section "Operations studies / Planned features include", I read: "automated timetable robustness assessment using stochastic simulation".

[1]https://osrd.fr/en/about/use-case/#%C3%A9tudes-dexploitation

I know I don't understand the domain at all, but I'm surprised that in this day and age you'd want a distributed system to do railway design. What aspect of the problem makes it unsuitable for running in a single process?

Very cool!

How hard is it to use though for someone without a real technical skill set ?

Looking forward to enjoying simulations of existing train networks