Seminar Announcement

Advanced Automatic Train Control Optimization

Pamela J. Williams (pwillia@sandia.gov)
CSMR, Sandia National Labs

Wednesday May 31, 2000
Bldg. 921, Room 137
2:00 p.m. - 3:00 p.m.

A new era of automatic train control has begun, in which mass transit trains will be commanded with precision beyond the capabilities of past systems. Although transit districts such as San Francisco's Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) have controlled their trains automatically for decades, the control systems have provided limited capability in terms of train position location and speed control. Increases in capacity now require trains to run closer together than these systems can accommodate. Therefore new systems, such as the Advanced Automatic Train Control (AATC) system, are under development. On a daily basis, BART's current system experiences approximately 20 delays of five or more minutes. The resulting backups lead to uncomfortable rides for passengers and wasted energy, and can cause power shortages. With more trains on the system, such problems will become more the rule than the exception. Our goal is to use optimization within the AATC system to smooth out train operations and to reduce energy consumption and power infrastructure requirements. We are initially focusing on a schedule-constrained problem with the primary objective of improving passenger comfort. Passenger comfort may be measured in terms of the smoothness of the ride, which is related to train acceleration. Using JAVA, a simplified simulator of train control has been developed. The simulation will permit the evaluation and testing of optimization algorithms under development. We will present results that demonstrate the effectiveness of optimization techniques to manage train interference during acceleration.

This seminar is hosted by the Computational Sciences and Mathematics Research Department at Sandia National Labs in Livermore, CA. For more information on this or other events, visit http://csmr.ca.sandia.gov/news.html. Visitors from outside Sandia require advance arrangements in order to attend. For more information, please contact the CSMR office management assistant Doretha Smith at dahall@sandia.gov or (925) 294-4630.