An Agent-Based Support System for Suburban Railway Traffic Control

Suburban railway lines are emerging in China in the last few years. Not as definite as in high-speed railway or urban rail transit, the applications of signaling and traffic control system in suburban railway have not been strictly defined. Based on the investigation of the traffic scale and its characteristics in suburban railway, and traffic control systems implemented respectively in national railway and urban rail transit, an agent-based system, named D-Agent, is presented to support suburban railway traffic control and management. It consists of six basic modules: local data, knowledge base, skills, reasoning mechanism, data processing, and communication. Infrastructure characteristics, train performances, safety and operational restrictions are stored in local data and knowledge base. Functions of traffic control and adaptive support become the skills of D-Agent, and all possible interfaces of traffic control system are learned as the languages of D-Agent for communication with other systems. Through continuous learning, D-Agent can be trained to support the traffic control system or dispatcher in handling traffic problems, as well in adapting to different signaling systems that may be applied in suburban railway.