Cooperation of the T-shape road intersection and the near railway level crossing

What is it about?

The paper deals with the problem of traffic control in the situation when controlled road intersection of the T-shape is situated close to the railway level crossing. That configuration very often brings some additional risks resulting from the phenomenon known as “blocking back”, i.e. blocking the movement of road vehicles found at the level crossing when a train is approaching and passing. There are various approaches how to eliminate that risk, one of them consisting in establishing cooperation between both installations and proper modification of signal control phasing of the near controlled road intersection. The authors briefly analyze and discuss the problem, its potential solutions and present an applied approach in the form of the animated UML-based model.

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Photo by Victor Barrios on Unsplash

Photo by Victor Barrios on Unsplash

Why is it important?

The use of the UML brings several novel principle benefits: it can support the whole development process (analysis, design, implementation, testing); it makes it possible to describe system functions more unambiguously, better structurally, and completely; UML-based specification (model) may serve as a communication tool within an international development team; sources codes may be generated automatically using the forward engineering; the development process may be supported by automatically generated documents respecting the required form; selected types of diagrams may be animated and thus used to present behavior of the system to the customer before the real implementation and/or to evaluate various test scenarios, etc. The last but not least advantage is that the UML is acceptable by safety authorities (in case of modeling of safety-related applications) or some other authorities and is generally understood by the wide engineering community.