Intelligent negotiation behaviour model for an open railway access market

Abstract

In an open railway access market, the provisions of railway infrastructures and train services are separated and independent. Negotiations between the track owner and train service providers are thus required for the allocation of the track capacity and the formulation of the services timetables, in which each party, i.e. a stakeholder, exhibits intelligence from the previous negotiation experience to obtain the favourable terms and conditions for the track access. In order to analyse the realistic interacting behaviour among the stakeholders in the open railway access market schedule negotiations, intelligent learning capability should be included in the behaviour modelling. This paper presents a reinforcement learning approach on modelling the intelligent negotiation behaviour. The effectiveness of incorporating learning capability in the stakeholder negotiation behaviour is then demonstrated through simulation.