Safety Relevant Positioning Applications in Rail Traffic using the European Satellite System "Galileo"

Die Ortung im Eisenbahnverkehr hat eine hohe sicherheitstechnische Relevanz. Eine falsch detektierte Position eines Fahrzeugs kann zu einer erheblichen Gefährdung führen, da die ermittelte Ortsinformation für die Freigabe und das Wiederbesetzen von Gleisabschnitten genutzt wird. Daraus abgeleitet, müssen Ortungssysteme bei der Zulassung unter anderem die folgenden sicherheitskritischen Anforderungen erfüllen Genauigkeit, Zuverlässigkeit, Integrität und Verfügbarkeit der Ortungsinformation, die gemäß SIL 4 nachzuweisen sind

RailDriVE - Ortung in der Spur

Das RailDriVE® eignet sich für vielerlei Nutzungszwecke für das DLR, Partner und Kunden. Das Spektrum reicht von der Entwicklungsbegleitung von neuen Ortungskomponenten in einer realen Umgebung im Eisenbahnbetrieb über die Untersuchung verschiedener Sensorkombinationen für unterschiedlichste Einsatzmöglichkeiten bis hin zur Erstellung von digitalen Streckenkarten

Operational and technical testing of the European Train Control System (ETCS)

The European train control system (ETCS) is one of the core parts of the European rail traffic management system (ERTMS) [1]. It has been specified by a European team in the last years [2]. The specification is published by the European Railway Agency (ERA). Different industry suppliers developed products according to this specification. Now those products have to be tested according to the testing requirements. Technical tests are used to prove that the product fulfil the technical requirements of the specification. They are called the conformity tests. Operational tests are used to show that the system fulfils the operational requirements of the railway operator. The idea presented here aims to show, that technical tests as well as operational tests can be defined according to a common standard. The main advantage of this approach is to perform the tests in the same lab environment. The system under test should be integrated in the Lab only once. Both kinds of tests can be executed without any modification of the lab integration. This leads on the one hand to a significant reduction of integration effort in the lab and on the other hand to a reduction of redundancy in the tests itself. This second increase in efficiency needs a methodical basis for the definition of the tests to be executed. This methodical base supports the optimization of the tests. Practically seen the approach allows identifying which parts of the requirements are already tested in the technical tests. In the next step the operational tests are designed by using test cases from the technical tests and adding the missing operational test cases. Finally the operational tests can be designed by focussing on the requirements which not tested yet. The full contribution shows the method of designing tests and the suitable test environment. As a perspective an approach for the generation of field test templates from the operational lab tests is given. The approach used for the conformity tests for ETCS can be extended for operational and safety lab tests as well as for operational field tests. The method of the generation of the test sequences can be used for the different types of tests. The optimization criteria as well as the rules for the parameterization differ for the different kinds of tests. If the same approach for the formalisation and parameterization is used, the lab environment can be used for any type of test

Moving Block Risk Evaluation

This contribution provides an overview of the past and current works of the safety works in the X2Rail Projects Moving Block Work Packages, focusing on the identification and evaluation of risks inherent to systems following the ETCS Level 3 specifications

Ökonomische Auswirkungen der Eisenbahninnovationen von Shift2Rail - The economic impacts of the railway innovations developed in Shift2Rail

The Shift2Rail initiative specifies, develops and dem onstrates new technologies in order to increase capacity and punctuality and reduce the costs of the future railway system. Due to the complexity of the railway system, the combined impacts of these technologies can lead to stronger or reduced effects. An integrated methodology using Key Performance Indicators (KPI) has therefore been developed, implemented and validated in order to estimate their overall impact. The final version of the integrated KPI assessment has been presented as a Shift2Rail cross cutting activity under the IMPACT-2 project

The KPI-Model - an integrated KPi assessment methodology to estimate the impact of different innovations in the railway sector

The Shift2Rail Joint Undertaking (S2R) has set impact targets for the future rail system. Those targets of the KPIs, calculated by comparing future KPIs in the year 2030 to baseline KPIs as of 2013, are defined in the Shift2Rail Master Plan. These include among others to double the capacity (+100%), half the life cycle costs (LCC) (-50%) and to increase punctuality by improving reliability by 50%. In order to keep track of the realisation of these targets and to measure their degree of fulfilment a quantitative KPI model has been developed. The modelling approach and implementation are discussed in this contribution

Immune Cell Profiling of the Cerebrospinal Fluid Provides Pathogenetic Insights Into Inflammatory Neuropathies

Objective: Utilize immune cell profiles in the cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) to advance the understanding and potentially support the diagnosis of inflammatory neuropathies.Methods: We analyzed CSF cell flow cytometry data of patients with definite Guillain-Barré syndrome (GBS, n = 26) and chronic inflammatory demyelinating polyneuropathy (CIDP, n = 32) based on established diagnostic criteria in comparison to controls with relapsing-remitting multiple sclerosis (RRMS, n = 49) and idiopathic intracranial hypertension (IIH, n = 63).Results: Flow cytometry revealed disease-specific changes of CSF cell composition with a significant increase of NKT cells and CD8+ T cells in CIDP, NK cells in GBS, and B cells and plasma cells in MS in comparison to IIH controls. Principal component analysis demonstrated distinct CSF immune cells pattern in inflammatory neuropathies vs. RRMS. Systematic receiver operator curve (ROC) analysis identified NKT cells as the best parameter to distinguish GBS from CIDP. Composite scores combing several of the CSF parameters differentiated inflammatory neuropathies from IIH and GBS from CIDP with high confidence. Applying a novel dimension reduction technique, we observed an intra-disease heterogeneity of inflammatory neuropathies.Conclusion: Inflammatory neuropathies display disease- and subtype-specific alterations of CSF cell composition. The increase of NKT cells and CD8+ T cells in CIDP and NK cells in GBS, suggests a central role of cytotoxic cell types in inflammatory neuropathies varying between acute and chronic subtypes. Composite scores constructed from multi-dimensional CSF parameters establish potential novel diagnostic tools. Intra-disease heterogeneity suggests distinct disease mechanisms in subgroups of inflammatory neuropathies

GateNet: A novel Neural Network Architecture for Automated Flow Cytometry Gating

Flow cytometry is widely used to identify cell populations in patient-derived fluids such as peripheral blood (PB) or cerebrospinal fluid (CSF). While ubiquitous in research and clinical practice, flow cytometry requires gating, i.e. cell type identification which requires labor-intensive and error-prone manual adjustments. To facilitate this process, we designed GateNet, the first neural network architecture enabling full end-to-end automated gating without the need to correct for batch effects. We train GateNet with over 8,000,000 events based on N=127 PB and CSF samples which were manually labeled independently by four experts. We show that for novel, unseen samples, GateNet achieves human-level performance (F1 score ranging from 0.910 to 0.997). In addition we apply GateNet to a publicly available dataset confirming generalization with an F1 score of 0.936. As our implementation utilizes graphics processing units (GPU), gating only needs 15 microseconds per event. Importantly, we also show that GateNet only requires ~10 samples to reach human-level performance, rendering it widely applicable in all domains of flow cytometry