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Connected or Autonomous Trains?

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Reliability, Safety, and Security of Railway Systems. Modelling, Analysis, Verification, and Certification (RSSRail 2019)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNPSE,volume 11495))

Abstract

In a parallel with the trends in the automotive domain, we discuss the future challenges of automation of train control, where train to infrastructure and train to train communication will support distributed control algorithms, while on board artificial intelligence will provide autonomous control decisions. Already installed systems, like ERTMS-ETCS, are actually distributed systems that span over geographical areas and are able to safely control large physical systems. But still, crucial decisions are taken at centralized places, that concentrate communications with mobile objects. Several prospected advances, aimed at increasing capacity and automation of rail transport, go in the direction of a more dynamic network connection among mobile components, in which decisions are actually taken in a distributed way.

A concept of dynamic safety envelope within which a train can safely move then emerges, built by a fusion of reliable information coming from the infrastructure and from other trains, as well as autonomously harvested by on-board “intelligent” sensors. This paper discusses some plausible scenarios in this respect and presents the basic concepts behind them.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    For brevity, we here ignore the usual distinction between ATP and ATC (Automatic Train Control).

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Acknowledgments

Thanks to Stefania Gnesi for her useful comments on a draft of this paper.

Work partially supported by the H2020 Shift2Rail-RIA-777561 project ASTRail and by Tuscany Region project POR FESR 2014-2020 SISTER.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Information Engineering, University of Florence, Florence, Italy

    Alessandro Fantechi

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  1. Alessandro Fantechi
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Correspondence to Alessandro Fantechi .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Laboratoire IFSTTAR/ESTAS, Villeneuve d’Ascq , France

    Simon Collart-Dutilleul

  2. ClearSy, Aix en Provence, France

    Thierry Lecomte

  3. Newcastle University, Newcastle-upon-Tyne, UK

    Alexander Romanovsky

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Fantechi, A. (2019). Connected or Autonomous Trains?. In: Collart-Dutilleul, S., Lecomte, T., Romanovsky, A. (eds) Reliability, Safety, and Security of Railway Systems. Modelling, Analysis, Verification, and Certification. RSSRail 2019. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 11495. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-18744-6_1

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