News Details
Student internship "Detecting deadlocks in railway schedules" completed
As railway networks increase in complexity and load, there is an increased risk of train deadlocks.
Such deadlocks occur when a set of trains cannot move along their planned paths because each train in this set is obstructed by another. The following figure illustrates this situation.
Detecting such deadlocks was the topic of a student internship supervised by systransis AG. Our intern, Mr. A. Amirtham, a computer science student at the ETH Zurich worked on this topic from july to september 2009. The task was to develop an algorithm to predict deadlocks within railway schedules. The formal methods Event-B was used to help develop and validate the algorithm.
This work has resulted in giving us important fundamental knowledge that we can use for a practical software solution to predict deadlocks in the area of train control systems.
