Fuzzy signature based description of complex overtaking and engagement conflicts in railway traffic control

The railway traffic system and its respective subsystems, especially station and timetable management are extremely large and complex systems comprising a multitude of complex structured data. The theoretical and pre-planned traffic control is calculating with idealized traffic situations, but the real life scenes often suffer from conflicts and deviations. The complex traffic conflict states include uncertain conditions and vagueness of information. Classical methods cannot work properly under these uncertain conditions. In this paper we propose a new approach to describe these complex conflict situations using fuzzy signatures for recognizing and describing traffic conflicts in a hierarchically structured manner.