Improvement of Suburban Railway Traffic Management System by Appliance of ITS

The suburban railway system plays a very important role in commuter traffic of urbanized areas around the world which is characterized by heavy congestion, especially during rush hour. Thus, any disruption of railway traffic may cause instability of the system and therefore service quality will decrease. To improve quality of railway services a centralized traffic management system is required. In such systems the key role belongs to the dispatcher who is usually supported by a computer based decision support system. The purpose of such systems is to help train dispatchers to control and plan rail traffic in real time operation. The development of such systems is based on ITS and represents state of the art in railway traffic management. The objective of this paper is now to present possibilities for improvement of centralized suburban railway traffic management system by appliance of ITS.