Cooperative and cognitive wireless networks for communication-based train control (CBTC) systems

In this paper, with recent advances in cooperative and cognitive wireless networks, we propose a CBTC system to enable train-train direct communications. In addition, the proposed system is optimized with the cognitive control method. Unlike the exiting works on cooperative wireless networks, in this paper, train control performance in CBTC systems is explicitly used as the performance measure in the design. Reinforcement learning is applied to obtain the optimal handover decision and adaption policy of communication parameters. Simulation result shows that the performance of train control can be improved significantly in our proposed CBTC system.