Evaluation of relative merits/demerits of different signalingschemes used at a railway station for an approaching train in IndianRailways today

摘要

Indian Railways, one of the largest railway networks in the worldntoday, has a peculiarity that a station exists almost every 5-7 km. Mostntrains do not stop at all stations and run through more stations thannthey stop at. The speed at which the trains run through the stations,ntherefore, is a crucial parameter that determines the run time of antrain through a section and, hence, the total throughput (or carryingncapacity of the railways). Indian Railways uses several signalingnschemes to enable movement of trains in a safe manner. The signalingnschemes play an important role in determining the action of the drivernin terms of slowing down of trains and, consequently, on the throughputnof the railway system. This paper examines the different signalingnschemes used currently and in the recent past by Indian Railways fromnthe point of view of information that they present to the train drivernand the impact that it has on total throughput. The signaling schemesnare compared using total signal entropy presented to the driver at eachnstage. Apart from theoretical computation of signal entropy, results ofnsome experiments conducted to obtain the impact of signaling schemes onnrun time of trains are also presented