The railway industry needs to investigate overall impacts of next generation signalling systems such as Moving Block (MB) and Virtual Coupling (VC) to identify development strategies to face the forecasted railway demand growth. To this aim an innovative multi-criteria analysis (MCA) framework is introduced to analyse and compare VC and MB in terms of relevant criteria including quantitative (e.g. costs, capacity, stability, energy) and qualitative ones (e.g. safety, regulatory approval). We use a hybrid Delphi-Analytic Hierarchic Process (AHP) technique to objectively select, combine and weight the different criteria to more reliable MCA outcomes. The analysis has been performed for different rail market segments including high-speed, mainline, regional, urban and freight corridors. The results show that there is a highly different technological maturity level between MB and VC given the larger number of vital issues not yet solved for VC. The MCA also indicates that VC could outperform MB for all market segments if it reaches a comparable maturity and safety level. The provided analysis can effectively support the railway industry in strategic investment planning of VC.

铁路行业需要调查移动块 (MB) 和虚拟耦合 (VC) 等下一代信号系统的整体影响，以确定应对预测铁路需求增长的发展战略。为此，引入了创新的多标准分析 (MCA) 框架，根据相关标准，包括定量（例如成本、容量、稳定性、能源）和定性标准（例如安全性、监管批准）来分析和比较 VC 和 MB。我们使用混合德尔福分析分层过程 (AHP) 技术客观地选择、组合和加权不同的标准，以获得更可靠的 MCA 结果。该分析针对不同的铁路细分市场进行，包括高速、干线、区域、城市和货运走廊。结果表明，鉴于 VC 尚未解决的重要问题数量较多，MB 和 VC 之间的技术成熟度水平存在很大差异。MCA 还表明，如果 VC 达到可比较的成熟度和安全水平，它在所有细分市场的表现都可能优于 MB。提供的分析可以有效支持铁路行业风险投资的战略投资规划。