An object-oriented approach to an information and decision support system for railway traffic control

The paper describes the analysis, design, and fast prototyping of MINT (Manager of Integrated Networks of Train traffic), an information and decision support system for railways traffic control. MINT is a complex system that tightly integrates information management and problem-solving functionalities, by means of an object-oriented approach. The work is characterized by several issues: (i) object-oriented analysis and design; (ii) knowledge-based application modeling, by means of a powerful conceptual language (TQL + +); (iii) advanced search techniques in the problem-solving component; (iv) fast prototyping by the automatic generation of executable code; (v) use of an advanced knowledge-based modeling and prototyping environment (Mosaico). The paper starts with a description of the railway traffic control problem, then it focuses on the architecture of MINT, paying particular attention to the database component and its train conflict-solving capabilities. Finally, a few experimental results are reported. (C) 1998 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.