Decentralization-and-Self-Regulation-Based Multi-Agent Traffic Dispatching System For Passenger-Dedicated Railway Lines

The traffic dispatching system for passenger-dedicated railway lines is the core for traffic management, traffic control as well as for train operations. The system is an indication and presentation of application of high-tech in traffic management over the passenger-dedicated railway lines and it is essential to ensure the best and effective use of the line capacity as well as to guarantee the safety and punctuality of the train operations. The research is aimed at developing a new generation and practical traffic dispatching and control system with higher degree of integrity and intelligence, and best suited to the actual requirements of the development of the Chinese passenger-dedicated railway lines. The research is focused on the system structure and configuration, the intelligent method and its implementation.This paper is intended to describe the overall solution for the proposed decentralization-and-self-regulation-based traffic dispatching system for passenger-dedicated railway lines and how the multi-agent technology is used in the system. The traffic dispatching system includes 6 subsystems: Plan Compilation, operation management, EMU management, power supply management, passenger service dispatching and comprehensive maintenance. The main research is conducted mainly on the operation management subsystem by combining the object-orientated method and agent design concept for traffic dispatching requirement analysis. Through the map-out between the entity of the traffic dispatching system and the agent object, the agent object, the agent classes hierarchy structure and the agent contributes in the dispatching process are defined including the inter-relationships and interactions. The paper puts forward a detailed definition and description about the internal structure of the agent, the representation of the knowledge and the processing method. The paper also shows the typical reasoning procedures in the agents.The paper proposes a decision hierarchy system, which is comprised of...