The paper concerns an Ant Colony Optimisation (ACO) procedure as approximation method for the railway infrastructure capacity (RIC) problem. Railway infrastructure managers now have to deal with operators’ requests for increased capacity. Planning the construction or reconstruction of infrastructures must be done very carefully due to the huge required investments and the long term implications...

The train timetabling problem (TTP) aims at determining an optimal timetable for a set of trains which does not violate track capacities and satisfies some operational constraints. In this paper, we describe the design of a train timetabling system that takes into account several additional constraints that arise in real-world applications. In particular, we address the following issues: • Manu...

At railway stations, waiting time is usually an unavoidable aspect of the journey for train passengers. According to the attentional model of time, pleasant surroundings and other forms of distraction reduce perceived waiting time. Not every individual reacts identically in the same surroundings. Passengers in different states of mind enter the station every day. The authors propose that for re...

BACKGROUND Exposure to intermittent magnetic fields of 16 Hz has been shown to reduce heart rate variability, and decreased heart rate variability predicts cardiovascular mortality. We examined mortality from cardiovascular causes in railway workers exposed to varying degrees to intermittent 16.7 Hz magnetic fields. METHODS We studied a cohort of 20,141 Swiss railway employees between 1972 an...

Such as relational databases, most graphs databases are OLTP databases (online transaction processing) of generic use and can be used to produce a wide range of solutions. That said, they shine particularly when the solution depends, first, on our understanding of how things are connected. This is more common than one may think. And in many cases it is not only how things are connected but ofte...

Rail transports are facing major challenges in our day to day life. On other hand, it must meet the needs of citizens for quality of moving easily while, on the other, it must provide a valid alternative to other nodes of transport against a backdrop of rising fuel prices and the increasing importance of the effect of transport on the environment. In conventional system the nodes are activated ...

Announcements at railway stations are a major information source for passengers. In order to ensure high intelligibility, the traditional solution is to use recorded prompts with “slot filling” of variable data. If a data type (e.g. train name) changes new recordings have to be made. Even with careful design the quality of the system will gradually deteriorate due to change of the voice of the ...

Wireless Sensor Networks constitute pervasive and distributed computing systems and are potentially one of the most important technologies of this century. They have been specifically identified as a good candidate to become an integral part of the protection of critical infrastructures. In this paper we focus on railway infrastructure protection and we present the details of a sensor platform ...