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Analysis of railway stations by means of interval timed coloured Petri nets

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Abstract

In this paperinterval timed coloured Petri nets ((van der Aalst, 1993)) are used to model and analyse railway stations. We will show that this approach can be used to evaluate both station operating schedules and the infrastructure of a station.

An interval timed coloured Petri net (ITCPN) is a coloured Petri net extended with time; time is in tokens and transitions determine a delay for each produced token. This delay is specified by an upper and lower bound, i.e. an interval. The ITCPN model allows for the modelling of the dynamic behaviour of large and complex systems, without loosing the possibility of formal analysis. In addition to the existing analysis techniques for coloured Petri nets, we use a new analysis method to analyse the temporal behaviour of the net. This method constructs a reduced reachability graph and exploits the fact that delays are described by an interval. We will also discuss other (Petri net based) methods that can be used to analyse railway stations.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Mathematics and Computing Science, Eindhoven University of Technology, P.O. Box 513, 5600 MB, Eindhoven, The Netherlands

    W. M. P. van der Aalst

  2. Department of Mathematics and Computing Science, Delft University of Technology, Mekelweg 4, 2628 CD, Delft, The Netherlands

    M. A. Odijk

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  1. W. M. P. van der Aalst
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  2. M. A. Odijk
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By order of and in co-operation with the Dutch Railway Company (NS), Department of Traffic Development.

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van der Aalst, W.M.P., Odijk, M.A. Analysis of railway stations by means of interval timed coloured Petri nets. Real-Time Syst 9, 241–263 (1995). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF01088807

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