Safety principles for designing a generic product for railway signalling systems

Abstract

Rail transport, as it was 200 years ago, is still a dangerous operation, where an accident can often result in many fatalities and significant material damage. The increasing rail traffic across Europe requires fast-response fully electronic interlocking systems. Besides rich functionality, such systems should be based on a single and simple safety principle, that ensure high availability and safety at the same time. This paper introduces the generic safety principles for designing a highly safe generic product for railway interlocking tasks, and also shows the design of such a product based on a new microarchitecture concept.