Real-time Rescheduling in Distributed Railway Network: An Agent-Based Approach

Abstract: This paper addresses the issues concerning the rescheduling of a static timetable in case of a disaster encountered in a large and complex railway network system. The proposed approach tries to modify the schedule so as to minimise the overall delay of trains. This is achieved by representing the rescheduling problem in the form of a Petri-Net and the highly uncertain disaster recovery times in such a model is handled as Markov Decision Processes (MDP ). For solving the rescheduling problem, a Distributed Constraint Optimisation (DCOP ) based strategy involving the use of autonomous agents is used to generate the desired schedule. The proposed approach is evaluated on the actual schedule of the Eastern Railways, India by constructing various disaster scenarios using the Java Agent DEvelopment Framework (JADE). When compared to the existing approaches, the proposed framework substantially reduces the delay of trains after rescheduling.