Investigation on the Performance of Train Timetable for the Case of Addis Ababa Light Rail Transit (AA-LRT)

One of the most decisive elements to have a good performance in a railway operation is the train timetable. With a good train timetable: the train can go faster, more frequently, more safely with efficient service to the passengers and with optimal use of the available resources. So that, investigating and studying of the current train timetable specifically for the newly operated AA-LRT timetable has a fundamental importance to design a new train timetable with better quality.The main parameters which have a big influence on the design of train timetable are the headway time, dwell time, trip time, speed, braking distance, synchronization of trains etc. So that, these parameters are discussed in detail and their values are calculated.  To check the validation of these calculated values, simulating software called Arena is used. In the Arena software parameters like headway, dwell time, speed, synchronization time, the number of trains and safety block are used as inputs. When these parameters are simulated, it runs correctly and gives valid result including visualizing animation to show the real traffic movement. So that, from the output of the simulation a decision is made for each parameter to compare with the existing timetable and to give an attention to their effect on the design of the timetable. Finally, based on the calculated values and simulating results a better result for the main parameters of the timetable is found such as for the current speed a headway time of 7.5 minutes should be used and for the current available number of trains a speed of 30km/h with headway of 5.55 minutes are the optimal values. Keywords: Animation, Arena Software, Dwell Time, Headway, Performance, Train Timetable

Train timetable generation using genetic algorithms

The scheduling of railway trains has been a research problem for many years. Many of the choices required are not known a priori and require exploration of the problem to determine them. A modular Genetic system was designedmake the evaluation function and preparation of the timetable tractable. The Genetic system consists of a Genome, split into Chromosomes so the extra choices that become known throughout the evolution can be added to the Chromosomes. A weighted fitness function and a multiobjective non-dominated fitness function were tried, and then partial objective ranking was added. The system has tackled a mixture of problems has produced promising results

An Overview and Categorization of Approaches for Train Timetable Generation

A train timetable is a crucial component of railway transportation systems as it directly impacts the system’s performance and the customer satisfaction. Various approaches can be found in the literature that deal with timetable generation. However, the approaches proposed in the literature differ significantly in terms of the use case for which they are in tended. Differences in objective function, timetable periodicity, and solution methods have led to a confusing number of works on this topic. Therefore, this paper presents a com pact literature review of approaches to train timetable generation. The reviewed papers are briefly summarized and categorized by objective function and periodicity. Special emphasis is given to approaches that have been applied to real-world railway data

Semantic Processing of Out-Of-Vocabulary Words in a Spoken Dialogue System

One of the most important causes of failure in spoken dialogue systems is usually neglected: the problem of words that are not covered by the system's vocabulary (out-of-vocabulary or OOV words). In this paper a methodology is described for the detection, classification and processing of OOV words in an automatic train timetable information system. The various extensions that had to be effected on the different modules of the system are reported, resulting in the design of appropriate dialogue strategies, as are encouraging evaluation results on the new versions of the word recogniser and the linguistic processor.Comment: 4 pages, 2 eps figures, requires LaTeX2e, uses eurospeech.sty and epsfi

Behaviorally Driven Train Timetable Design

The focus of this thesis is to include the passengers and their behavior inside the train timetable design. This is done through three main objectives: timetable design based on passenger satisfaction, exploitation of hybrid cyclicity and choice based revenue optimization. At first, a new Passenger Centric Train Timetabling Problem is introduced into the planning horizon of the passenger railway service. This problem is inter-disciplinary. It combines the discrete choice theory, that models the passengers' behavior, and operations research, that decides on the departure times of the trains (i.e. the timetable). The attributes affecting the passengers' choices with respect to the operated timetable are quantified into a single variable of passenger satisfaction. The objective of the proposed model is the trade-off between the profit of the train operating company and the overall satisfaction of the passengers. The problem is tested on the case study of the morning peak hours in S-train network of Canton Vaud in Switzerland. The results not only confirm that the passenger centric timetables outperform the operational timetable of Swiss Federal Railways (SBB), but they also demonstrate that there is a considerable gap between the performance of the cyclic and the non-cyclic timetable. The cause of this gap are the cyclicity constraints and therefore, new types of hybrid cyclicity are proposed and tested. The aim of the hybrid cyclic timetables is to provide similar level of flexibility (passenger satisfaction) as the non-cyclic timetables while keeping a certain level of regularity (cyclicity). The regularity is taken care of by the design and the flexibility is evaluated upon solving of the previously defined Passenger Centric Train Timetabling Problem. The new types of timetables are tested against the existing types on the case study of one day in the whole network of Israeli Railways. It is shown that the hybrid cyclic timetable can achieve both benefits (regularity and flexibility) at the same time. In the last part of this thesis, the passengers' actual choices are obtained through a discrete choice model. The model takes into account fundamental principles in economics such as demand elasticity, ticket price and opt-out option for passengers. Therefore, the probabilistic Elastic Passenger Centric Train Timetabling Problem provides more realistic solutions. Moreover, since the choice is explicitly modeled, the new problem is integrated with a ticket pricing, in order to improve the level of service. In other words, to prevent overcrowding or to secure the service for passengers who need it the most, etc. To summarize, this thesis makes significant contributions in the conceptual design of timetables by taking into account the passengers and their wishes. Indeed, the planning from the operator's point-of-view is in the state-of-the-art, whereas the passengers have been neglected or have been considered only as an abstract concept

PARADISE: A Framework for Evaluating Spoken Dialogue Agents

This paper presents PARADISE (PARAdigm for DIalogue System Evaluation), a general framework for evaluating spoken dialogue agents. The framework decouples task requirements from an agent's dialogue behaviors, supports comparisons among dialogue strategies, enables the calculation of performance over subdialogues and whole dialogues, specifies the relative contribution of various factors to performance, and makes it possible to compare agents performing different tasks by normalizing for task complexity.Comment: 10 pages, uses aclap, psfig, lingmacros, time

Personal Agents for Implicit Culture Support

We present an implementation of a multi-agent system that aims at solving the problem of tacit knowledge transfer by means of experiences sharing. In particular, we consider experiences of use of pieces of information. Each agent incorporates a system for implicit culture support (SICS) whose goal is to realize the acceptance of the suggested information. The SICS permits a transparent (implicit) sharing of the information about the use, e.g., requesting and accepting pieces of information

Dialogue with computers: dialogue games in action

With the advent of digital personal assistants for mobile devices, systems that are marketed as engaging in (spoken) dialogue have reached a wider public than ever before. For a student of dialogue, this raises the question to what extent such systems are genuine dialogue partners. In order to address this question, this study proposes to use the concept of a dialogue game as an analytical tool. Thus, we reframe the question as asking for the dialogue games that such systems play. Our analysis, as applied to a number of landmark systems and illustrated with dialogue extracts, leads to a fine-grained classification of such systems. Drawing on this analysis, we propose that the uptake of future generations of more powerful dialogue systems will depend on whether they are self-validating. A self-validating dialogue system can not only talk and do things, but also discuss the why of what it says and does, and learn from such discussions