Braun, I.; König, S.; Schnieder, E.:
Concepts on a Future Railway Management System.
Proceedings of the 8th World Congress on Intelligent Transport Systems - ITS 2001, Sydney/Australia, Oktober 2001.
Today's world is characterized by a growing demand for mobility of individuals and goods. As a result, especially road traffic has enormously increased within the last years and lead into a problematic situation, as road net capacity is completely exploited by passenger and cargo traffic and limits for further net expansions have been reached. In parallel, alternative means of transportation, such as the railway sector, have not experienced a comparable boom and offer high potentials for development. In regard to the undoubted potentials in rail traffic, overcoming the problems (e.g. high prices, low flexibility, long term preparation of train composition) could lead to an increasing attractiveness of railways to the customer both in passenger and cargo traffic. In this context, new solutions have to be developed in rail management apart from innovations in technology and operation (1). As an approach for enhancing rail traffic performance and attraction especially to customers from the cargo sector, the paper suggests a re-structuring of railway management systems (RMS) according to modern distributed informational systems. By this, a more flexible, scalable and customer centered traffic management system can be realized which offers possibilities for further innovation by its open architecture. As a second step, the structure of a future RMS is described which fulfills essential requirements on a RMS and serves as a "transport service management system", which is not just a "transport management system" and provides a full mobility service to the customer instead of pure transport service. For a realization, agent theory is suggested to serve as an enabling technology as well as state of the art technologies like wireless communication and satellite based location.