smartrail 4.0 – the innovation program of the Swiss Federal Railways

2019-09-04

Swiss Federal Railways (SBB) wants to evaluate the potentials of new technologies and of the digitalization of future applications with the smartrail 4.0 project. SIListra Systems assessed the suitability of Coded Processing for modern, advanced railway interlocking systems. Coded Processing and Diversified Encoding enable the implementation of interlocking systems on Commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) hardware. These interlocking systems must fulfill the highest safety level SIL4. To reach this level, Diversified Encoding must be supplemented by hardware-redundancy.

As part of a feasibility study an architecture was analyzed that consists of Diversified Encoding together with a safety middle-ware. This architecture allows to safely run generic SIL4 applications on COTS-hardware. The safety middle-ware implements the redundant distribution of the applications for the required hardware fault tolerance and the voting between the hardware channels. Hence, the architecture is generic and also suitable for other applications besides railway interlocking. More information:

Logo smartrail4.0