FPGA Design of a Cellular Automaton Model for Railway Traffic Flow with GPS Module

Abstract

In this paper, an electronic system able to reproduce the complex dynamic behaviors of the train movement is presented. In particular, a Cellular Automaton (CA) model inspired by Li et al. corresponding model was developed in order to provide efficient control of the railway traffic flow. The proposed model was implemented on a (Field Programmable Gate Array) FPGA to take full advantage of the inherent parallelism of CAs. The FPGA design which results from the automatically produced synthesizable VHDL code of the CA model is considered as basic component of a portable, low total cost electronic system. The later also includes a high performance Global Positioning System (GPS) wireless communication module for the monitoring of train activity in the under study railway. The aforementioned module in conjunction with the proposed fully automatically programmable FPGA device minimizes the design burden offering the chance of real-time train control operation based on the presented CA model.