Optimal Management of Railway Perturbations by Means of an Integrated Support System for Real-Time Traffic Control
Résumé
Automatic real-time control of railway traffic perturbations has recently received the
attention of practitioners. The aim is to make use of mathematical algorithms to maintain
the required service availability during unplanned disturbances to operations. In the
literature many tools for real-time traffic control are proposed, but their effects on traffic
have never been studied neither in real life nor in realistic simulation environments. We
can mention only a few pilot tests and a unique installation in the Lötschberg Base tunnel
in Switzerland, which is in any case an ad-hoc implementation not extendible to other
case studies. In this paper we present the ON-TIME framework for the real-time
management of railway traffic perturbations. The main innovation is a standard web
service-oriented architecture that ensures scalability and flexibility. A standard RailML
interface is used for the input/output data of the modules, allowing immediate
applicability of the framework to any network having a RailML representation. The
scalability makes the framework independent from the number of modules and the amount
of data exchanged. The flexibility permits any module to be replaced with others having
similar features. The framework is tested in a closed-loop with the simulation
environment HERMES for a perturbed traffic scenario on the Swedish Iron Ore line. Tests
are performed for two different replanning algorithms (ROMA and RECIFE) used as
conflict detection and resolution modules of the framework. The analysis represents a
proof-of-concept to confirm the effectiveness of our framework in automatically solving
conflicts and deadlocks during perturbed traffic conditions.