An optimization approach for real-time headway control of railway traffic

Headway irregularity not only increases average passenger wait time but also causes additional energy consumption and more delay time at bottlenecks. A real-time headway control model is proposed to maintain headway regularity at bottlenecks in railway network by adjusting the travel time on each segment for each train. The adjustment of travel time is based on a consensus algorithm. In the proposed consensus algorithm, the control law is obtained by solving Ricatti equation. The minimum running time on segment is also considered. The computation time of the proposed method is analyzed and the analysis result shows that it can satisfy the requirement on real-time. The proposed model is tested and the consensus trend of headways can be observed through simulation. The simulation results also demonstrate that energy consumption canbe reduced by 0.1% at most and the delay time is reduced by 6.5% at least after using the proposed method.