Railway emergency plan modeling based on Petri net

Abstract

Purpose – When a railway emergency occurs, it often leads to unexpected consequences, especially for trains of higher speed and larger passenger flow. Therefore, the railway emergency plan, a pre-established plan to deal with emergencies, plays an important role in reducing injuries and losses. However, the existing railway emergency plans remain as plain-text documents, requiring lots of manual work to capture the important regulations. This paper aims to propose a visualized, formal and digital railway emergency plan modeling method based on hierarchical timed Petri net (HTPN), which is also of better interpretability. Design/methodology/approach – First, the general railway emergency plan was analyzed. Second, the HTPN-based framework model for the general railway emergency plan was proposed. Then, the instantiated model of electric multiple units rescue emergency plan was built by ExSpect, a Petri net simulation tool. Findings – The experiments show that the proposed model is more digital and of better readability, visualization and performability, and, meanwhile, can generally conform to the practice well, offering a promising reference for future analysis of the optimization of railway emergency plans. Originality/value – This study offers a promising reference for future analysis of the optimization of railway emergency plans.

Keywords

• railway emergency plan
• modeling
• hierarchical timed petri net
• emus rescue