On September 10, 2016, the first stage of the Moscow Central Ring (MCR) was launched. MCR is intended to become an integral part of the modern transport system in Moscow distributing the passenger flow of the capital. Control of passenger traffic within MCR is entrusted to «Moscow Metro», State Unitary Enterprise, and its carrier is «Russian Railways», OJSC.
A total of 31 transport and transfer junctions are located within the Moscow Central Ring, and 134 pairs of the «Swallow» trains run daily. The maximum speed of such rolling stock is about 120 km/h, and its capacity is 1200 passengers. During peak hours, trains run around the ring every six minutes, and in off-peak time — on average every 12 minutes. Hence, the high frequency and complexity of traffic dispatching.
The problem of entering electric trains into the schedule in the event of various failures and delays in traffic is very relevant. To help dispatchers, an automated system for resolving conflict situations has been developed based on multi-agent technology.
The head contractor of the project is “NIIAS”, OJSC, the leading sectoral research institute in creation of complexes and systems for ensuring traffic safety, traffic management, and geoinformation support.
To work in this direction, our company signed a contract with “NIIAS” for designing a multi-agent scheduler, which provides operative recalculation of the timetable for traffic of electric trains along the entire ring and selects the optimal solution to eliminate backlog in the schedule.
The calculation results are communicated to the dispatcher, transmitted as the pass plan to the engine driver and are even used to automatically set routes (point switching) at the stations.
Similar systems developed by our company already operate to control the “Sapsan” traffic and more than 700 trains on the Moscow-St. Petersburg section along the 36-hour interval and for interactive construction of train traffic graphs on the Baikal-Amur Mainline (BAM).