A Multiagent Approach to Automating Railway Capacity Request Approval

Abstract

Ongoing growth of the Dutch railway passenger and cargo transporting system demands that the current infrastructure is utilised at utmost efficiency. Next to creating a train schedule well in advance, traffic operators regularly have to schedule new trains in a current, dynamic planning. When the request to create a path for the new train is sent by the transporter company, it is handled by the different parties responsible for the execution of the train schedule. A top-down approach is taken where the operator with the most global view of the network first creates a draft of the train. After that he notifies those operators that have a smaller but more detailed view on the infrastructure, all the way down to the level of switches, signals and sections. This already modular process was subsequently built using a multi-agent system, closely mimicking the roles and responsibilities seen in practice. The system was built in PRL-Game, a mockup of the operator systems used in reality, to ensure a timely realisation and provide a safe playground for the agents. Experimentation to validate the agent system was done on a minimal scale, although preliminary results were exciting and inspiring.