With this dissertation, it is intended to improve our understanding of the effects of urban rail systems on the mobility of women, their accessibility and their extent of experiencing the city they live in, that is their urban geography. The main aim is to understand whether women who live nearby an urban rail system and who use this system have higher levels of mobility and wider urban geography when compared with those who live in places without an urban rail access and those who do not use urban rail systems. In search for the effects of metro usage on mobility, as well as the factors affecting metro usage, the study is built on four main fields in transportation studies: mode choice theory, activity based travel theory, time-geography theory and women studies. Women living on Ankara metro line and in Ke&ccedil / i&ouml / ren constitute the main case study in this thesis. With the help of a comprehensive questionnaire, applied on captive public transport women riders, it is assessed whether the Ankara metro has positive effects on the mobility of women living nearby the metro stations, whether women who use the metro have higher mobility and wider urban geography, and whether the metro can be effective in enhancing the mobility and urban geography of women who are identified as particularly vulnerable in the literature. Understanding the factors, in cases where expected positive impacts on mobility have not been realized, is also important to contribute to the theoretical discussions that the study is built on.

Disruptions severely undermine the reliability of railway systems. Consequently, a lot of investments are made to improve disruption management. Much has already been written about disruption management, often with the purpose of supporting operators in their decision making. However, to the best of our knowledge, this literature doesn't consider the structural differences of disruption management in different countries. An overview of the various ways in which disruptions are solved and conditions under which that happens could help rail infrastructure managers and train operating companies to reconsider the ways in which they operate. This paper takes stock of the similarities and differences in how disruptions are managed in Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Germany and the Netherlands. Of importance is not only how these systems work on paper, but above all what happens in practice, i.e. the habits and routines that operators have developed for solving disruptions.

Le trafic ferroviaire urbain est quotidiennement sujet à des perturbations qui le dévient de son comportement nominal. Afin de minimiser l'impact de ces perturbations, les opérateurs ferroviaires usent de diverses techniques. Nonobstant leur efficacité, les performances de ces techniques ne sont généralement pas bien étudiées ni sont-elles optimales, car élaborées empiriquement. C'est dans ce cadre-ci que vient cet ouvrage fournir des solutions qui permettent d'évaluer ces techniques de régulation et d'en comparer les performances dans des contextes variés. L’approche proposée se base sur des variantes de réseaux de Petri comme modèles et sur la méthode de Monte-Carlo pour en simuler l’exécution. Cette combinaison a donné naissance à SIMSTORS, un outil de simulation pour les systèmes ferroviaires urbains, et plus généralement, pour les systèmes stochastiques régulés. Additionnellement, nous nous intéressons dans cette thèse à la problématique de la réalisabilité des tables horaires qui pilotent le trafic ferroviaire. Ces tables décrivent le comportement temporel désiré des systèmes pour lesquels elles sont conçues. Or, la construction de ces tables ne garantit pas toujours sa réalisabilité, notamment dans un contexte stochastique. Ainsi, nous proposons ici une méthode permettant de vérifier si une table horaire est bien réalisable avec une probabilité strictement positive. / Urban rail traffic is subject to numerous disrupting events that drift it from its nominal behavior. In order to minimize the impact of these disturbances, rail operators rely on a set of techniques. Despite their efficiency, performances of theses techniques are rarely well studied, nor are they of proven optimality; a direct consequence of them being empirically built. It is in this particular context that comes our work to provide solutions that allow for the evaluation of such techniques and for the comparison of their relative performances in various scenarios. The proposed approach is based on variants of Petri nets as models, and on the Monte-Carlo method for the simulation of their execution. This combination has led to the development of SIMSTORS, a tool for the simulation of urban rail systems, and more generally, stochastic systems under dynamic rescheduling. Additionally, this thesis addresses the question of timetable realizability; that is whether or not a given timetable is indeed realizable by a system for which it was built. Indeed, a timetable is meant to drive the behavior of a system but there is no guarantee as to its realizability. We therefore propose a method for the verification of the realizability of timetables with a strictly positive probability.