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Securing rail freight operations I
Published in Richard R. Young, Gary A. Gordon, Jeremy F. Plant, Railway Security, 2017
Richard R. Young, Gary A. Gordon, Jeremy F. Plant
While the first commercial applications of information technology was the automation of commercial systems, even in the 1960s the railroads began to apply potential solutions to their operational issues. Railroads, not unlike many of the parallels found in commercial aviation, rely on communications and signaling systems to control train movements, but they also have adopted control systems for aligning track, detecting train defects such as hotboxes and dragging equipment, and providing the location of locomotives and freight cars on their networks using radio frequency identification systems (RFID).22 CTC systems allow railroads to control train speed and direction remotely but also enable them to operate more tonnage over fewer track miles by more efficiently and systematically managing train movements. They have become as a result a major bonus to productivity. Moreover, CTC has allowed the railroads to shrink their infrastructure and staffing requirements so as to accommodate increases in volume without needing to make the capital investment in more track. More recently, the FRA has mandated that PTC systems be installed on all road locomotives23 to reduce the potential for error that could result in derailments and potential loss of life should two trains occupy the same track. Originally installed in 2000 on locomotives operating on Northeast Corridor where Amtrak passenger trains, Norfolk Southern and CSX freight trains, and an assortment of commuter agencies operate daily, PTC has enjoyed an excellent safety record. PTC, however, is a concept rather than a single system, given that there are several providers offering different levels of sophistication, but nevertheless all are compatible and offer the same general benefits.
Real-time collision handling in railway transport network: an agent-based modeling and simulation approach
Published in Transportation Letters, 2019
Poulami Dalapati, Abhijeet Padhy, Bhawana Mishra, Animesh Dutta, Swapan Bhattacharya
Some rear-end collision avoidance strategies are discussed in Wu et al. (2015), Wang et al. (2017). In Wu et al. (2015), authors consider only one track in one-way to model and analyze rear-end collision. The collision avoidance parameters such as train distance control system, train state communication-control system, and danger alert system are assumed to be incorporated within the system. To avoid a rear-end collision due to erroneous commands from Automatic Train Protection (ATP) system, a parallel Centralized Traffic Control (CTC) and ATP-based interval control are proposed in Wang et al. (2017). The idea of wild geese formation is used here in which, the ATP controls the train interval as goose interval, adjusting the interval between two following trains locally; while CTC controls the same as goose line to keep the formation globally. CTC act as a centralized monitor in case of emergencies. Whereas in our proposed work, the system is fully distributed where each train can communicate autonomously with other trains or stations or junctions to take dynamic decisions to avoid collisions without any centralized system interventions. Moreover, both rear-end and head-on collision avoidance strategies are described in our present work. Here, not only a single track in single way, the whole network with both up and down direction in multiple tracks are taken into consideration.