MODELING AND IMPLEMENTATION OF THE EGYPTIAN RAILWAYS TRACKING AND CONTROL SYSTEM

ABSTRACT
Egypt Government decided to implement a new advanced Railways Tracking and Control
System (RTCS). The main aim is to protect the citizen’s (passengers) life, future, and business
through achieving quick trains-conflict detection, and resolution, short response times in the
event of disasters and other operational disturbances, and elimination of most or all “human
factors” trains accidents. TRCS can also overcome the problem of railways traffic congestion
which has increasingly become a major economic barrier to the flow of goods across the
country. A team has been dedicated for the Egyptian RTCS project where the system
investigation, data gathering, feasibility study, data analysis, system design phases have been
accomplished and the project is now in the real implementation phase. The new advanced
RTCS combines real-time rescheduling with an advanced train control tool. The system is
designed to increase railway network capacity and stability in heavily used mixed traffic
networks while minimizing the cost of building new railway infrastructure. The system combines
real-time rescheduling, train control, and a new strategy for train operations into a coordinated
Main Control Center (MCC) for traffic management. This approach is based on saturated use of
network capacity bottlenecks, which is implemented by ensuring that MCC and every train
always have up-to-date, conflict free schedule containing time, and speed and route
information. The implementation of the Egyptian RTCS shall provide the input data about the
railway subsystem (i.e. stations, locomotives, trains, trips…etc) that help in modeling the RTCS.
The objectives of the modeling are to assign the fleet of locomotives to a network of trains while
satisfying a variety of trips constraints and minimizing the total economic cost.
The research on the modeling of railways transportation include scheduling theory, graph theory,
mathematical programming, operational theory, and some have addressed the problem of traffic
controlling from multiple levels’ points of view. In this paper, RTCS planning is formulated as
Mixed Integer Programming (MIP) problem. The modeling network is a weekly space-time
network where arcs denote trains, nodes denote events (arrivals and departures of trains at
terminals), and different locomotive types define different commodities.
The objectives of this paper are to present the building of Egyptian RTCS project effort and to
emphasis on the benefits of implementing this project as well as to present the use of integer
MIP techniques for modeling such an RTCS.