ABSTRACT

With  the  growing  interest  in  the railway  sector, mainly  because  of
energetic  reasons, there  is also  a need to  increase the  efficiency of
the railway lines. One way  to optimize this  sector is to improve quality
in the train control  process itself. Nowadays, train dispatching is still
mostly done  by  human  operators that  use elementary  tools and  thereby
solving conflicts sub-optimally.  Motivated by  these factors, this report
presents a model  capable of  detecting and  solving conflicts, for single
track  railways. More  specifically, this  model  proposes  two resolution
methods:  a heuristic  resolution  and a search  for the optimal solution.
To evaluate the  quality of the  developed model, several tests were made,
obtaining  encouraging results. These  results showed  that it is possible
to solve  conflicts optimally or  near optimally, in a  feasible amount of
time. This program comes with a graphic interface so that  the interaction
with the dispatcher can be more user friendly. The major novelties of this
work  regard  the  improvement  on  the  conflict  detection  process, the
introduction of capacity conflicts, and the creation of several parameters
to adjust the search for the optimal solution.