Open Access

ARTICLE

Modeling Train Movement for Moving-Block Railway Network Using Cellular Automata

Yonghua Zhou¹, Chao Mi¹

1 School of Electronic and Information Engineering, Beijing Jiaotong University, Beijing, P. R. China

Computer Modeling in Engineering & Sciences 2012, 83(1), 1-22. https://doi.org/10.3970/cmes.2012.083.001

Abstract

Cellular automata (CAs), model the dynamics of complex systems as the state update of cells restricted from their own neighbors. This paper regards the tempo-spatial constraints as dummy neighborhoods of cells for train movement, such as scheduled movement authority and speed restriction, equivalent to the maximum displacements during the future certain time steps and each time step, respectively. Under the framework of CA modeling, this paper attempts to propose an improved CA model for moving-block railway network which incorporates the tempo-spatial constraints to capture the restrictive, synergistic and autonomous dynamics. We divide the one-dimensional cell lattice into several segments, called instantaneous movement authority, with individual speed restriction and target speed. The physical law controlling train movement is gradually implemented on the segmented lattice. The simulation based on the proposed CA model can reconstruct the phenomenon observed in realistic train movement, such as go-and-stop wave, its back propagation to the upstream, tracking and feedback adjustment. The applicability and rationality of the proposed model has been elucidated through various simulation tests. The model of train movement based on CAs can facilitate finding out the plans to improve the performance of railway network.

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Keywords

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