PETRI NET TOOLS FOR SIMULATION OF RAILWAY OPERATION.pdf

PETRI NET TOOLS FOR SIMULATION OF RAILWAY OPERATION Gabriele Malavasi - Stefano Ricci University of Rome “La Sapienza” - DITS - Transport Area Via Eudossiana, 18 - 00184 - Roma - Italy Tel: +39.06144 - Fax: +39.06 E-Mail: gabriele.malavasi@uniroma1.it, stefano.ricci@uniroma1.it 1 INTRODUCTION AND OBJECTIVES From the increasing attention towards the railway interoperability and safety arise the need of models capable to support the decision processes concerning the system upgrade, particularly for the performances of the signalling in terms of carrying capacity and safety. The paper explains the main results of an ongoing research concerning the development of a network model, including lines and stations, capable to simulate the traffic operations on the basis of the actions performed by the signalling components; this approach allows a high flexibility and capability to manage the traffic command and control operation. The successful work carried out in the past on the application of the Petri Net formal method for the simulation of the station interlocking systems (Malavasi et al., 1999) (Malavasi, 2000) suggested to investigate the possibility to apply the same method to the more general problem of traffic simulation. 2 METHODOLOGICAL APPROACH The development of a global network model includes the integration of: ? a generalised station model to be applied to any lay-out and interlocking system; ? a generalised line model to be applied for any signalling system. The modularity performance of the Petri Net modelling tool allows the easy integration of the models with a simple chaining of their extreme modules (e.g. track circuits, block sections and related signals); the resulting network model allows the simulation of different timetables without traffic density constraints. 3 STATION MODEL The Petri net station model includes typically sets of nodes corresponding to various objects categories: track c