ON-TIME – A Framework for Integrated Railway Network Operation Management

Railway traffic management today is mainly performed by human controllers according to national rules. Traffic Control Systems which are mainly used to manage data coming from the field are expensive and have proprietary interfaces. Under these circumstances, managing cross-border traffic and dealing with future increases in capacity demand represent difficult challenges for railway operators. In the project ON-TIME (Optimal Networks for Train Integration Management across Europe) funded under the 7 th Framework Programme of the European Union, railway infrastructure managers, railway technology developing industry and academic institutions strive to regard the process of railway traffic management in a holistic way in order to meet these challenges. The paper presents the overall approach of the project and presents in detail the approaches on real-time perturbation management and real-time train speed regulation.