Business optimization through automated signaling design

M.Ing. (Engineering Management)Abstract: Railway signaling has become pivotal in the development of railway systems over the years. There is a global demand for upgrading signaling systems for improved efficiency. Upgrading signaling systems requires new signaling designs and modifications to adjacent signaling systems. The purpose of this research is to compare manually produced designs with design automation by covering the framework of multiple aspects of railway signaling designs in view of business optimization using computer drawings, programming software language and management of signaling designs. The research focuses on design automation from the preliminary design stage to the detailed design stage with the intention of investigating and resolving a common project challenge of time management. Various autonomous methods are used to seek improvement on the detailed design phase of re-signaling projects. An analysis on the project’s duration, resources and review cycles is conducted to demonstrate the challenges that are faced during the design of a project. Signaling designs are sophisticated and crucial in an ever-changing railway environment. As a result, there is a demand for efficiency and knowledge within railway signaling to achieve successful completion project target dates. A quantitative approach is used to identify the gaps leading to delays and best practices are applied using a comparative analysis to remediate on any snags that may potentially extend the project duration. The results illustrate that the resources required when automating detailed designs are reduced by two thirds for cable plans and book of circuits and reduced by one third for source documents. Successively, the projects benefit with reduced organizational resources, reduced design durations and reduced design review cycles. This research concludes that software integration of the signaling designs due to the efficiency and innovation of the selected computer drawing software and programming software language such as AutoCAD required less resources for computer drawings that are generated using automation tools compared to computer drawings that are generated manually. The resources required when automating the generation of signaling detailed designs are reduced for cable plans, book of circuits and source documents. This means that the business is optimized by utilizing less resources and subsequently delays are reduced during the design stage

Dynamic state machines for modelling railway control systems

Verification and Validation of railway controllers is the most critical and time-consuming phase in a system development life-cycle. It is regulated by international standards, which explicitly recommend the usage of state machines to model the specification of the system under test. Despite the great deal of works addressing the usage of state machines and their extensions, model-based verification and validation processes still lack concise and expressive-enough notations able to easily capture peculiar features of the specific domain of multi-process control systems, on which proper tool chains can be implemented in order to realize effective and automated environments. This paper introduces a novel class of hierarchical state machines, called Dynamic STate Machines (DSTMs), and proposes an approach for modelling and validating railway control systems, based on the new specification language. Key features of DSTM are recursive execution, parallelism, parameter passing, abortion transition, and communication through global variables and channels, but its main peculiarity resides in the semantics of fork and join operators which allows for dynamic instantiation of machines (processes). The formal semantics of DSTM allows for the definition of verification and validation methodologies supported by automated tools. The paper also describes how DSTM specifications may be mapped to Promela models in order to achieve automated generation of test cases by model checking and Spin. The work presented in this paper was carried out in the context of an European project and is strongly driven by the industrial necessity of tackling issues concerning the automation of functional system-level testing of modern railway signalling systems. Hence, the language and the proposed approach are illustrated and motivated by applying them to a specific functionality of the Radio Block Centre, the vital core of the ERTMS/ETCS Control System