For medium and large-scale urban rail services, any disruption of the operating schedule due to signal malfunction or accident involving injury or death can have wide ranging effects throughout the city. When such incidents occur, alternate means of transportation such as temporary bus services are arranged, but currently, operation of such buses is decided onsite. This research proposes a system that links agents in a multi-agent simulation to real-world transportation service companies and passengers and is able to make predictions within several minutes of an incident, of the operating state and transportation conditions 1 to 3 hours later, to decide a plan for operating alternate transportation based on these predictions, and to present this plan to bus companies and passengers in an on-line fashion. The results of simulations using a prototype of this system indicated that it will be able to facilitate bus companies to provide alternate transportation, and passengers to use such transportation, within five minutes of an incident occurring in a public transportation service on the scale of a city of one million people.
Railway operators usually do not consider the limit of the electrical energy supply in Japan. Although technologies have been developed for energy efficiency, the limit on the available electrical energy is not considered. However, railway operators met the limit in summer 2011 after the earthquake off the Pacific coast of Tohoku. In this study, we develop an electrical energy allotment method for a large railway network. The method optimizes train operations to provide better railway service when the energy supply is limited. We also develop a search method to find the optimal operation from very large combinations of operation factors. These optimization and search methods are evaluated using the Tohoku earthquake scenario. C⃝ 2016 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Electr Eng Jpn, 196(3): 49-57, 2016; Published online in Wiley Online Library (wileyonlinelibrary.com).
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