Advanced Tool for Railway Planning and Traffic Control Decision Making

This paper focuses on the difficulties noticed in Railway’s Decision Making processes according to schedule-making and to control tasks on the central operation post of principal railway lines. Traffic density, rail stations’ capacity and human criteria are main factors in order to develop and to obtain a useful tool for helping Railway Administrations in the decision making processes. In this sense, a tool is presented to operate off-line for planning and scheduling; and on-line for common operation on traffic central post. The architecture is oriented to save time in specific modules where operation tools are trained on different scenarios to solve particular ‘events’ which are defined to be critical for the line. The objective is the generation of an optimal operational plan to regulate the line with minimum train delay according to the characteristics of the line (stations, facilities) and vehicles. The results are proven useful for mass-transport, like underground, or open-line topologies with mixed traffic both passenger and freight.Copyright © 2007 by CITEF, Universidad Politecnica de Madrid