An object-oriented approach to an information and decision support system for railway traffic control

The paper describes the analysis, design, and fast prototyping of MINT, an information and decision support system for railway traffic control. MINT is a complex system that tightly integrates information management and problem solving functionalities, by means of an object oriented approach. The work is characterised by several issues: (i) object oriented analysis and design; (ii) knowledge based application modeling, by means of a powerful conceptual language (TQL++); (iii) advanced search techniques in the problem solving component; (iv) fast prototyping by automatic generation of executable code; (v) use of an advanced knowledge based modeling and prototyping environment (Mosaico). The paper starts with a description of the railway traffic control problem, then it focuses no the architecture of MINT, with a particular attention to the database component and its train conflict solving capabilities.