Optimal traffic control at railway junctions

Optimal distribution of traffic flows at junctions in emergency cases

The aim of this work is to present a technique for the optimization of emergency vehicles travel times on assigned paths when critical situations, such as car accidents, occur. Using a fluid-dynamic model for the description of car density evolution, the attention is focused on a decentralized approach reducing to simple junctions with two incoming roads and two outgoing ones (junctions of 2 × ...

Real-time traffic control in railway systems

Despite the constantly increasing demand of passengers and goods transport in Europe, the share of railway traffic is decreasing. One major reason appears to be congestion, which in turn results in frequent delays and in a general unreliability of the system. This fact has triggered the study of efficient ways to manage railway traffic, both off-line and real-time, by means of optimization and ...

Supervised learning from human performance at the computationally hard problem of optimal traffic signal control on a network of junctions

Optimal switching of traffic lights on a network of junctions is a computationally intractable problem. In this research, road traffic networks containing signallized junctions are simulated. A computer game interface is used to enable a human 'player' to control the traffic light settings on the junctions within the simulation. A supervised learning approach, based on simple neural network cla...

Railway Traffic Management

With the growing interest in the railway sector, mainly because of energetic reasons, there is also a need to increase the efficiency of the railway lines. One way to optimize this sector is to improve quality in the train control process itself. Nowadays, train dispatching is still mostly done by human operators that use elementary tools and thereby solving conflicts sub-optimally. Motivated b...

Railway traffic flow optimisation with differing control systems