Modelling of signalling for an interactive on-line rapid transit railway simulator

The multi-train simulator package for rapid transit (metro) railways has been developed since 1973 in the University of Birmingham. The simulator consists of two sections-the movement simulator and power network solution. The movement simulator has been tailor-made to suit particular signalling systems. Therefore, significant changes in program code have been required to incorporate any new signalling system. This is not always practical because both signal engineer and computer programmer must be available, which will inevitably make the simulator inflexible and this procedure is also inefficient. The paper proposes an expert system to overcome this drawback. It is employed before the simulation process to produce the program code of the movement simulator, which is then complied and linked with the power network solution to form the main simulator