The 15th International Conference on Railway Engineering Design and Operation (COMPRAIL 2016), is the latest in a series of very successful meetings which started in Frankfurt in 1987 and continued in Rome (1990); Washington (1992); Madrid (1994); Berlin (1996); Lisbon (1998);

Bologna (2000); Lemnos (2002); Dresden (2004); Prague (2006); Toledo (2008); Beijing (2010); the New Forest, home of the Wessex Institute (2012) and Rome in 2014. The meeting is organised by the Wessex Institute and sponsored by WIT Transactions on the Built Environment and the International Journal of Sustainable Development and Planning. The Conference aims to update the use of advanced systems, promoting their general awareness throughout the management, design, manufacture and operation of railways and other emerging passenger, freight and transit systems. It emphasises the use of computer systems in advanced railway engineering.

The meeting attracts a variety of specialists interested in the development of railways, including managers, consultants, railway engineers, designers of advanced train control systems and computer specialists. It provides a forum for researchers, academics and practitioners involved in railway engineering to present and discuss the latest developments. Since 1994 all published papers are archived in the Wessex Institute eLibrary (www.witpress. com/elibrary), where they are permanently available to the international community.