A New Platform for Railway Traffic Control Based on Multi Agent Systems Theory

Increasing growth of traffic volume in railway transportation leads human thinks about controlling and handling it using traditional methods, but during last decade which high speed trains are discussed, intelligent and automatic traffic control approaches are taken into consideration. Due to distributed essence of railway traffic system and because of special capability of Multi Agent Systems (MAS) in dealing with such systems, in this paper, we propose a hierarchical architecture based on MAS for railway traffic control systems. We consider center of traffic control (CTC), stations and trains as agents. Flexibility, extensibility, reliability and robustness will be some of remarkable advantages of controlling railway traffic using MAS versus traditional methods. We use MATLAB and JADE (Java Agent DEvelopment framework) to validate effectiveness of proposed structure using Tehran Subway Line 2 specifications.

Keywords:

Intelligent Railway Traffic Control , Multi Agent Systems , Knowledge-based Architecture , Cooperation