Discrete Events: Timetables, Capacity Questions, and Planning Issues for Railway Systems

The theory of Discrete Event Systems (DES’s) is a research area of current vitality. The development of this theory is largely stimulated by discovering general principles which are (or are hoped to be) useful to a wide range of application domains. In particular, technological and/or `man-made’ manufacturing systems, communication networks, transportation systems, and logistic systems, all fall within the class of DES’s. One of the key features that characterize these systems is that. their dynamics areevent-drivenas opposed totime-driven, i.e., the behavior of a DES is governed only by occurrences of different types of events over time rather than by ticks of a clock.