The Belgian railway network has a high traffic density with Brussels as its gravity center. The star-shape of the network implies heavily loaded bifurcations in which knock-on delays are likely to occur. Knock-on delays should be minimized to improve the total punctuality in the network. Based on experience, the most critical junctions in the traffic flow are known, but others might be hidden. ...

High speed trains are an indispensable part of rapid transportation systems in many countries. As the fastest means of transport on the ground, these trains are extremely sensitive to the terrain and track conditions. Geometrical irregularities and mechanical characteristics of the track, together with inconsistencies in the lane (including bridges that support the track) are considered importa...

It is shown how neural spike train responses can be predicted by truncated Wiener series and by LN-cascade models. To prove the capability of these methods we test them on spike trains which have been generated by model neurons. The agreement of the approximated responses and the neuron response to known stimuli is analysed quantitatively by calculating least mean square errors and rates of coi...

Acknowledgments We are grateful to S.N. Baker for organizing the EPSRCfunded Newcastle workshop on Spike Train Analysis, which inspired the writing of this review. We thank M. Diamond and E. Arabzadeh for sharing their data, and P.E. Latham, L. Paninski and J.D. Victor for useful discussions and insightful comments. Our research was supported by Pfizer Global Development (SP,RS), EPSRC EP/C0108...

In examining spike trains, different models are used to describe their structure. The different models often seem quite similar, but because they are cast in different formalisms, it is often difficult to compare their predictions. Here we use the information-geometric measure, an orthogonal coordinate representation of point processes, to express different models of stochastic point processes ...

Detecting the excess of spike synchrony and testing its significance can not be done analytically for many types of spike trains and relies on adequate surrogate methods. The main challenge for these methods is to conserve certain features of the spike trains, the two most important being the firing rate and the inter-spike interval statistics. In this study we make use of operational time to i...

At present, the railway transport are always held up or even suspended because of the natural disasters occurred frequently. In order to guarantee the smooth operation of the railway transport and reduce the number of trains affected by the disasters as few as possible, proposal of train scheduling scheme with optimal invulnerability is proposed in this paper. Firstly, train scheduling network ...

The locomotive assignment and the freight train scheduling are important problems in railway transportation. Freight cars are coupled to form a freight rake. The freight rake becomes a train when a locomotive is coupled to it. The locomotive assignment problem assigns locomotives to a set of freight rakes in a way that, with minimum locomotive deadheading time, rake coupling delay and locomotiv...