A Fuzzy Petri Net approach to decision-making in case of railway track closures

Modern train traffic systems have to fulfill high requirements on service reliability and availability. This becomes especially important with competitive transport markets. Train operators can only meet with these requirements by quickly developing an efficient action in case of traffic disturbances. This paper describes a dispatching support system which employs fuzzy expert knowledge. The approach is based on a fuzzy Petri net notion that combines the graphical power of Petri nets and the capabilities of fuzzy sets to model rule-based expert knowledge in a decision support system. An assistant system for train traffic control is presented, and the advantages of this fuzzy Petri net notion are shown in the context of a complex railway on-line control problem.