Control of railway traffic on a single line

Railned, a division of the national railway company in The Netherlands, is considering to improve and to partly automate planning procedures and control of the railway-network. It has asked CWI for advice on control. A hierarchical model is proposed with the levels of national railway network, traffic control district, and individual trains. At the level of traffic control district the optimal control problem is considered of determining the optimal departure ordering of trains on links of a single railway line of a network so as to minimize delays at arrival times. For control of railway traffic on a single edge with two trains it is shown that, under certain conditions, the optimal control law has a switch-over curve. For control of a railway network an algorithm is proposed based on decomposition.