Multi-agent Train Driver Rescheduling: Simulating Environment Dynamics

This demonstration presents recent developments in the MAS@NS project: a collaboration between Netherlands Railways and the D-CIS Lab to explore the effectiveness and suitability of a decentralized multi-agent approach to crew rescheduling. The project (launched in 2007) was reported on earlier at BNAIC’08 [1] and other conferences ([2], [3]). These publications describe the problem domain and present the rationale behind the MAS-based approach as well as details concerning the architecture and performance results. The project has resulted in a full scale prototype at the end of 2008, which is capable of solving large disruptions based on actual timetable and driver duty data. This demonstration focuses on recent advances in the ongoing pursuit of the goal of evaluating the system in an operational setting.