Railway Track Layout Modeling and its Application to an Automatic Route Setting System

Abstract

Automatic Route Setting (ARS) is a major subsystem of railway traffic management systems. ARS automatically sets routes in accordance with timetables, train descriptions, and facility situations. To develop the ARS system, various conditions have to be considered, such as train operations, track layouts, and equipped facilities. This leads to a huge amount of work in ARS development aimed at dealing with software variations among ARS products. In order to improve the productivity of ARS, this paper proposes a new model for model-based development of ARS. In this model, railway tracks are expressed as a digraph in which a node and an edge, respectively, represent a route and a topological relationship between two routes. Edges are consist of 23 elements and each element is associated with a specific kind of route-setting feature. A trial ARS system based on this model was developed for the feasibility study and was confirmed to work sufficiently in three different areas by inputting modeled track layouts.