There are switches that move trains between tracks. Now you need every switch to report, keep a history of that. Many trains also separate and combine. Trains sometimes go backwards to be switched.

It's not impossible. But handwaving GPS placement of trains at the correct location, direction, and track deserves more than a handwave as trivial.

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esafak 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

All of those failure modes can be accommodated. I fail to see anything here a competent engineer couldn't address. I speculate it's not a technical problem, but an operational and cultural one. This is not rocket science.

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1718627440 3 hours ago | parent [-]

But it must be also cheaper and more reliable than the current system, otherwise nobody is going to implement it.

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makethem6666688 an hour ago | parent [-]

Two rtk receivers with LTE including a little battery backup would cost what, $2,000 per car tops?

Presumably switches already report their position to somewhere.

It's absolutely unacceptable for this problem exist in today's world.

	▲	1718627440 an hour ago \| parent [-]
		> Presumably switches already report their position to somewhere. Yeah and this somewhere already knows whether a crash is going to happen. In which case your solution brings no benefit. You can't rely on the correctness of a system, which you want to make an alternative to, to help in the case the original system fails. This discussion focuses on a non-problem (granted partly due to an imprecise comment of mine). The system knows where all the trains are and also that a crash will happen, if the decision is made, that then indeed was made. What is needed is that the system needs to convince the operator there is still a problem, after it proved itself unreliable. My suggestion would be a log of the constraints the prover encountered while determining whether there is a conflict. This certainly already exists somewhere in the background, but I am not aware whether that is currently shown to operators in deployed systems. It does exist somewhat in the research systems we use in university.

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6 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

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