A Proposal of Autonomous On-board Train Control System and Road Run Testing

Abstract

Many private railways and municipal railways in Japan use the Automatic Train Control (ATC) system as their train protection system. This system has the function to transmit the permitted speed, determined by the position of the preceding train, through the track circuit and indicate that speed in the driving cab and the function to apply brakes according to the permitted speed. Since this system applies brakes in several stages until the train reaches a halt, the application and release of brakes at each speed stage causes a loss and it is impossible to shorten the headway between two trains.
We have developed a new system where the ground equipment transmits the stopping point only and the train is controlled autonomously based on the stopping point information. This system, called D-ATC hereafter, enables shorter train headways than the existing ATC with multi-stage braking. A prototype of this system was build and tested using an actual train in order to judge whether its commercial use is possible. This paper describes the proposal of D-ATC and results of the test runs.