Novel approach for validation of innovative modules for railway traffic management systems in a virtual environment

Abstract

To increase operational efficiency, resilience and capacity of the railway system, the development of modern railway traffic management system (TMS) has attracted more and more attention in recent years. To support the development and implementation of the next generation of TMS and related applications, advanced data collection, transmission and processing approaches, digitalised databases, and virtual validation platforms, etc., are required. In the context of the TMS development (addressed by Technology Demonstrator 2.9 of Shift2Rail Innovation Programme 2), this support is to be provided by a scalable, interoperable and standardised communication platform for internal and external communication between different subsystems, applications and clients. This paper outlines the approach of the ongoing OPTIMA project aimed to develop a communication platform demonstrator for railway TMS based on a novel Integration Layer (IL) and its various interfaces to entities including integration layer services, TMS service, rail business service, external services and operator workstations. Further detailed discussion in this paper relates to the approach to validating the communication platform demonstrator as a functional entity, and as a virtual testing environment to validate railway traffic management and other applications. The validation approach for the applications tested on the communication platform demonstrator is also presented. The results of future implementation of this validation approach will be used to assess the functionality of the communications platform demonstrator developed, and the initial TMS applications tested on it, and form an important step towards developing and implementing IL based communications platforms for future TMSs.

Services interfaces for interoperability of signaling computer interlocking on borders

“…The model represented in Figure 4 is a global modeling of the interlocking with categories or families of functions regarding Moroccan signaling principles. To ensure the communication of interlockings in borders, especially because of the use of different signaling principles, we choose to rely on ERTMS [11] background needs to define service interface functional block (SIFB).…”

Formalization and Processing of Data Requirements for the Development of Next Generation Railway Traffic Management Systems

“…The H2020 S2R OPTIMA (cOmmunication Platform for TraffIc ManAgement demonstrator) project [8], started in December of 2019, is strictly linked to TD2.9 as it aims to implement and validate a demonstrator of a communication platform for the testing and validation of novel industry solutions for next generation TMSs. The components of the communication platform developed by OPTIMA are conceived to ensure seamless access to persistent data from heterogeneous data sources with automated data exchange process, real time availability and configurable quality of service (QoS) levels for services [3,7]. The Integration Layer (IL) is the core component providing the functionalities of a middleware between the sources and consumers of data, and Traffic Control and Management Applications, hosted in the Applications Framework that provides a uniform deployment environment in which to deploy various TMS services into virtual machines or containers with a plug-and-play approach.…”