DARYN, a distributed decision-making algorithm for railway networks: modeling and simulation

In DARYN, the decision process for every train is executed by an on-board process that negotiates for temporary ownership of the tracks with the respective station controlling the tracks, through explicit processor to processor communication primitives. This processor then computes its own route utilizing the results of its negotiation, its knowledge of the track layout of the entire system, and its evaluation of the cost function. Every station´s decision process is also executed by a dedicated processor that maintains absolute control over a given set of tracks and participates in the negotiation with the trains. Since the computational responsibility is distributed over all the logical entities of the system, DARYN offers the potential of superior performance over the traditional uniprocessor approach. The development of a realistic model of a railway network based on the DARYN approach and implementation on a loosely coupled parallel processor system are reported. Experimental results indicate DARYN´s feasibility, significant superiority over the traditional approach, and that it exhibits, in general, the notion of performance scalability