Atal Bihari Vajpayee - Indian Institute of Information Technology and Management, Gwalior, India. A-117, ABV-IIITM, Gwalior, M.P., India.

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Abstract—Indian Railways (IR) work on static block signaling (SBS) system to control mixed train traffic. Current state of operation can be improved by using communication based train control (CBTC) system with moving block signaling (MBS). The mixed traffic conditions in IR restrict the direct use of CBTC systems used elsewhere and thus first necessitated study of existing CBTC systems followed by development of CBTC system for IR. Operations research and constraint programming technologies do not cope well in complex, dynamic, and highly interactive systems like railway operations. Multi-agent systems are event based and have been used to express many complex real systems. Developments of multi-agent systems are based on logical structure design phase and implementation phase. Lack of sufficient standards and tools makes the design of complex agent based applications difficult thus most of the work do not describe the design phase in detail. This paper uses methodology for engineering systems of software agents (MESSAGE) for the analysis and design of multi-agent based CBTC system for IR. The paper describes the detail design of sub-goal moving authority given for the block section while considering various run time scenarios that might interrupt normal running of trains. A good structural design of the system shall however help for the study of behavioral aspects of the system through simulation or deployment.

Index Terms—CBTC, MESSAGE, multi-agents, railway signaling, structural design.

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Cite: Anshul Verma, K. K. Pattanaik, "Multi-Agent Communication Based Train Control System for Indian Railways: The Structural Design," Journal of Software vol. 10, no. 3, pp. 250-259, 2015.