Modeling and control of railway networks

In this paper, we consider the modeling and control of railway networks. The main aim of the control is to recover from delays in an optimal way by breaking connections and changing the departure of trains (at a cost). To model the controlled railway system, we use a switching max-plus-linear system description. We define the optimal control design problem for the railway network, and we show that solving this problem leads to an integer optimization problem. By solving an easier low-dimensional real-valued optimization problem, we obtain good initial values for the integer optimization problem.