The recent restructuring process in railways aims to improve the resource utilisation and quality of service. Such a process involves separating the railway organisation into a number of stakeholders who are commercially driven to compete for rail resources (for example tracks and rolling-stocks) and consumers (passengers and freight). This paper identifies the key modelling issues of the reformed railways by reviewing the impacts of restructuring on business management, engineering operations and regulatory issues. It has been found that the essential modelling elements are distributive entities, resource negotiation processes and rationality. While most conventional models are unable to capture all these characteristics, the advances of modelling approach of multi-agent systems (MAS) can be adopted to represent the stakeholders by software agents which are autonomous and capable of rational behaviour and communicative acts. MAS for the restructured railways will be proposed for modelling and the potential advantages of MAS applications in railway engineering will be highlighted. (Author/publisher) For the covering entry of this conference, please see ITRD abstract no. E211825.
Samenvatting