Level crossing traffic management for an innovative on-demand public transport rail system

Managing priority at intersections where conventional road vehicles interact with automated light rail systems poses new challenges, particularly with the emergence of Ferromobile. Ferromobile is an autonomous public transport service operating on existing railways, either through fixed schedules or demand-responsive transport (DRT). By reactivating disused rural lines in France, it aims to improve regional mobility. Unlike conventional trains, Ferromobiles are similar in size and weight to road shuttles, raising specific operational concerns at level crossings (LCs). The irregular arrivals inherent to on-demand services make it problematic to grant systematic priority to Ferromobiles, as this may lead to congestion and unsafe driver behavior. This calls for a redefinition of priority rules between rail and road traffic, contrary to conventional railway practice. We propose an optimization-based framework that uses a moving time window to dynamically allocate passage slots to Ferromobiles while respecting safety constraints and traffic throughput objectives. The objective function pursues two goals: (i) reducing rail delays and (ii) minimizing disruption to road traffic. In this article, two optimization models, CQCM and PQCM, were implemented on the Pyomo platform and compared both with each other and with two reference scenarios without optimization in order to evaluate their operational efficiency and impact on LC traffic management.