An Agent-Based Prototype for Freight Trains Traffic Management

The increasing amount of train traffic highlights the necessity of automated tools for decision support, mainly when the availability of tracks is known on a day-by-day basis and no long-term schedules can be made. The paper describes the use of CaseLP, a logic programming based environment for developing multi-agent system prototypes, to face the management of freight trains traffic between the Italian stations of Milano and La Spezia. This real case-study, developed within the framework of the EuROPE-TRIS Project [6], has been chosen for evaluating the benefits of prototyping and testing a decision support system following an agent-based approach. The choice of a logic programming paradigm as the basis for the prototyping environment is motivated and compared with other existing solutions.

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