Assessment of rail service capacity under the current regulations aimed at ensuring social distancing conditions against the COVID-19 pandemic

Due to the global pandemic we are experiencing, our lives and social behaviours in urban contexts are deeply changed. Many regulations and rules have been and still are enacted by the world’s governments to minimise the level of risk to which the population is exposed. The majority of them aims at ensuring people social distancing and, in this context, the public transport sector plays a crucial role. Indeed, guaranteeing social distancing on buses or trains, while maintaining good service quality at the same time, represents a very challenging goal. Within this framework, the paper presents a methodology for optimising rail service operations thus satisfying mobility demand while complying with the maximum occupation coefficients allowed by current regulations. In order to show the goodness of the proposed method, it has been applied in the case of a real regional rail line in the south of Italy.