Railway Use Case

 

 

The railway use case will integrate UP2DATE platform in the railway signalling domain to be able to fulfil the safety and security requirements needed for remote updates; which will be implemented through highly available, reliable, secure and EN50129 standard compliant open or closed communication channels.

 

 

  • The main objective is to achieve a 50% long term cost reduction during both the installation phase and the maintenance activities during the whole product life cycle.

 

      • In the installation phase, it is necessary to adjust the configuration parameters or even some software functionalities of more than one device of the system, placed in different locations along the track and with different levels of criticality. Usually, these modifications have to be done by having the specialized technicians physically access the different devices to perform the update. UP2DATE will automatized this both costly and time-consuming updating procedure, especially in safety critical systems where the update procedure itself gets also more complicated.

      • During the maintenance phase, uploads are less frequent, but they have a bigger impact as the system is under operation. In this case, all tests and checks need to be done when there are no trains running (successive nights). UP2DATE will reduce the team of technicians need to simultaneously work in order to minimize the time needed for the update (thus maximizing testing time each night).

 

  • The UP2DATE architecture instantiation proposed for the railway use case is based on the introduction of a Gateway device that centralizes the simultaneous update of all the individual devices of the signalling system without the need to physically access them.

 

      • The Gateway will communicate with a central server, where all the relevant files for all the affected devices are generated from a common source for a given system version, thus ensuring their coherency.

      • The gateway will also integrate a number of railway signalling applications of different criticalities, reducing in this way the overall number of devices in the field.

      • The Gateway device will also collect maintenance and performance information of the signalling devices in order to be able to monitor the operation of the system after an update.