The digitalization of railways allows for improvements in service reliability, safety, security, and predictability. It relies on stable connections and innovative services. This paper presents an approach to designing critical railway voice communication applications, which follows the principles of a service-oriented architecture. Security-related functions, such as user data management and policy management that can be reused by different railway applications, are identified and designed as services. Common features, such as role management and presence, location, invite-a-user messaging, assured voice communications, and multiuser talker control, are also designed as services. The resources relevant to each service are defined and their unique identifiers are organized in tree structures. Moreover, the supported methods are described. Use cases illustrate the use of the services’ Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) in critical voice communication applications. The common application logic is modeled using call-state models, which present the application and network views. The models are formally described and it is proven mathematically that they exhibit equivalent behavior. The service API’s performance is studied through emulation to evaluate the injected latency.
The symmetry between customer expectations and operator goals, on one hand, and the digital transition of the railways, on the other hand, is one of the main factors affecting green transport sustainability. The European Train Control System (ETCS) was created to improve interoperability between different railway signaling systems and increase safety and security. While there are a lot of ETCS Level 2 deployments all over the world, the specifications of ETCS Level 3 are under development. ETCS Level 3 is expected to have a significant impact on automatic train operation, protection, and supervision. In this paper, we present an innovative control system architecture that allows the incorporation of artificial intelligence (AI)/machine learning (ML) applications. The architecture features control function virtualization and programmability. The concept of an intelligent railway controller (IRC) is introduced as being a piece of cloud software responsible for the control and optimization of railway operations. A microservices-based approach to designing the IRC’s functionality is presented. The approach was formally verified, and some of its performance metrics were identified.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.