Modeling Basic Components of Railway Systems Using Timed Arc Petri Nets

Abstract

Timed Petri Nets is a powerful modeling paradigm for concurrent and dynamic systems such as railway systems. In this work, Timed-Arc Petri nets, which has been recently proposed by authors, is considered for modeling railway systems. In this novel approach, a time-element representation is introduced, deterministic time-delays is assigned with arcs and firing processes are associated with time, where time was interpreted as firing delays. By this way, the complete map of all states are obtained and invisibility of some states is inhibited as different (an advantage on) from similar modeling tools. In this work, some basic components such as a railway switch, multiunit two and three-aspect signals, blocks, and a fixed block signaling concept for one and two block signaling are modeled by deterministic Timed-Arc Petri Nets.