Supporting intelligent control design of rail infrastructures

Currently, rail control designers are looking for innovative types of control strategies in order to make rail infrastructures more robust, more reliable, and more efficient. Control designers are focusing on more flexible control strategies in order to keep the system performance stable when nonplanned situations occurs. Applying new control strategies to rail infrastructures is difficult, because strategies cannot be fully assessed for their quality before implementation. Existing testing tools normally only assess the strategy itself and do not consider its impact on the whole system, nor do they assess the impact of the system on the strategy. This issue was confirmed during an inductive case study performed at a Dutch transportation company. To tackle this problem, a simulation based environment is proposed to better assess control strategies for rail infrastructures.