Railway Station Turnout Grouping Based on Threaded Binary Tree

Grouping the turnouts of the railway station is necessary for station design and operation management. To reduce the workload of station design engineers and improve the accuracy and efficiency of turnout grouping, this article designed an automatic turnouts grouping algorithm based on threaded binary tree. This article provided a comprehensive summary of the principles governing the grouping of turnouts in railway stations. It innovatively applied the concept of threaded binary trees from Graph Theory to construct a detailed model of the station throat area. Through a meticulously designed four-step algorithm (comprising the traversal of throat routes, elimination of invalid routes, generation of parallel routes, and final grouping of turnouts), the study derived the optimal turnout groups. By addressing the turnout grouping problem in the renovated Zhengzhou Station and Shenmuxi Station, this study has successfully identified the turnout groups, all train routes, and their interrelationships. It has also thoroughly analyzed the weaknesses in the station throats.