Integrating GIS with Cellular Automaton Model for Railway Transportation Safety System

The railway transportation safety system is a complex dynamic system with spatio-temporal characteristics. However, currently commercial geographical information system (GIS) lacks these capabilities for spatio-temporal analysis and modeling. Cellular automaton (CA) model can provides GIS with a bottom-to-top spatio-temporal modeling frame. The simplicity and flexibility make CA able to simulate a variety of behaviors of complex systems. In order to meet the needs of spatio-temporal simulation of the railway transportation safety system, we propose a new CA model -- a safety system model for railway (SSM-R) -- to simulate the railway safety and put forward the integrated GIS and CA framework. Based on the integration method, a simulation experiment is carried out with ArcGIS Engine 9.1 and Dot Net. The results show that the model can interpret the evolutional law of the railway transportation safety system and GIS-CA integration can simulate realistic railway transportation safety system.