Railway interlocking systems and Gröbner bases Original Research Article

Railway interlocking systems are designed to prevent conflicting actions (related to the position of switches and signals) during everyday railway exploitation. A decision model (independent from the topology of the station) based on the use of polynomial ideals and Gröbner bases is presented. This decision model can also be used to check whether a given section is accessible by a train located in another section or not. The fact that trains could occupy more than one section does not affect the model.