Design-Time Railway Capacity Verification using SAT modulo Discrete Event Simulation

Paper in proceeding, 2018

Railway capacity is complex to define and analyze, and existing tools and methods used in practice require comprehensive models of the railway network and its timetables. Design engineers working within the limited scope of construction projects report that only ad-hoc, experience-based methods of capacity analysis are available to them. Designs have subtle capacity pitfalls which are discovered too late, only when network-wide timetables are made - there is a mismatch between the scope of construction projects and the scope of capacity analysis, as currently practiced. We suggest a language for capacity specifications suited for construction projects, expressing properties such as running time, train frequency, overtaking and crossing. Verifying these properties amounts to solving a planning problem constrained by discrete control system logic, network topology, laws of motion, and sparse communication. To describe train dynamics one uses second-order linear differential equations which when solved analytically give rise to non-linear equations over real variables. We argue that reasoning over the whole discrete/continuous solution space is not efficient with current state-of-the-art solvers. Instead, we have solved the problem by building a special-purpose solver which splits the problem into two: an abstracted SAT-based dispatch planning, and continuous-domain dynamics and timing constraints evaluated using discrete event simulation. The two components communicate in a CEGAR-loop (counterexample-guided abstraction refinement). We show that our method is fast enough at relevant scales to provide agile verification in a design setting, and we present case studies based on data from existing infrastructure and ongoing construction projects.