Real-time Collision Handling in Railway Network: An Agent-based Approach

Advancement in intelligent transportation systems with complex operations requires autonomous planning and management to avoid collisions in day-to-day traffic. As failure and/or inadequacy in traffic safety system are life-critical, such collisions must be detected and resolved in an efficient way to manage continuously rising traffic. In this paper, we address different types of collision scenarios along with their early detection and resolution techniques in a complex railway system. In order to handle collisions dynamically in distributed manner, a novel agent based solution approach is proposed using the idea of max-sum algorithm, where each agent (train agent, station agent, and junction agent) communicates and cooperates with others to generate a good feasible solution that keeps the system in a safe state, i.e., collision free. We implement the proposed mechanism in Java Agent DEvelopment Framework (JADE). The results are evaluated with exhaustive experiments and compared with different existing collision handling methods to show the efficiency of our proposed approach.