OTP—Optimizing Traffic Planner--it’s just what you’d expect from Union Switch & Signal, the industry’s leader in rail safety, reliability, efficiency and dispatching solutions since 1881. While our products continue to advance, our mission remains the same—to make your rail network safer, more reliable, and more productive than ever before. Discover how we can keep your business on track.
The A-Team Approach
Imagine a control center fully staffed by a team of highly experienced dispatchers who continuously analyze, share, and optimize your network's movement plans based on live data feeds to achieve your business objectives. That's the principle behind the 'brains' of OTP—its dynamic A-Team (asynchronous team) architecture, a unique agent-based, problem-solving technology that generates optimized train movement plans in real time.
The A-Team problem-solving methodology has proved to be very effective at solving extremely complex optimization problems, which includes optimizing the movements of trains across a railroad network. Multiple problem-solving algorithms, none of which are individually very effective at solving problems of this nature, become very powerful when organized to work together in a cooperative manner, producing better solutions faster than when they are applied alone. A-Team approaches have been used to solve a variety of complex problems, including paper mill scheduling, electrical network control, protein structure analysis, and complex building design. Union Switch is the first and only company to commercially apply this technology to the problem of train traffic optimization.
Within this collaborative computational environment, A-Team agents cooperate and problem-solve using a pool of shared information that contains a variety of possible train movement plans, along with operating rules and constraints. As OTP continually receives updated CAD and field data, its agents generate and issue new executable movement plans while revising or deleting existing ones, evolving the overall pool of train movement plans so that they improve over time. As a result, plans are quickly optimized, driving peak performance along every mile of your network.
A Real-Time Advantage
As OTP addresses your railroad's complex logistics and operating needs, it also goes the distance in meeting and even exceeding your business objectives.
Integrated with your railroad's existing computer-aided dispatching (CAD) system, OTP's robust, realtime capabilities can quickly take into account all of the factors and exceptions on your network at any given moment, including schedules, device state changes, train location, track authorities, temporary speed restrictions, and more.
What happens next? With optimized planning and routing comes increased predictability, reduced risk, and overall network stability. Your capability to deliver on your commitments soars. Your ability to make delivery guarantees rises. Thanks to OTP, time is finally on your side.
