Norwegian version of this page

RailCons: Automated Methods and Tools for Ensuring Consistency of Railway Designs (completed)

The goal of the project is to design railway infrastructure with higher capacity and safety. By providing tool-assisted methods, the project contributes to reduce the Norwegian public spending for railway signalling designs. PhD thesis link (5,5 Mb).

Screenshot from the verification tool showing an error.

PhD Defense on 18th October from 13:15 in Kristen Nygaards sal (5370), Ole-Johan Dahls hus, Gaustadalléen 23B

Official

The RailCons-project is funded by Norges forskningsråd (NFR). The project is a collaboration between

The planned duration of the project is 48 months, the funding period spans from the mid 2015 till mid 2019).

Application number: ES545819

Project number: 248714

In a nutshell

The goal of the project is to design railway infrastructure with higher capacity and safety. By providing tool-assisted methods, the project contributes to reduce the Norwegian public spending for railway signalling design. To achieve these goals, the project researches and develops methods for consistency checking and optimization of railway signalling designs that help engineers finding a design with higher capacity and safety. Furthermore we will apply improved software methods for consistency checking and optimization of railway signalling to case studies in Norwegian railway construction. It will lead to automated software tools for the sector of railway signalling design, in general, with focus on specific Norwegian and Scandinavian regulations. The software will enhance Railcomplete's knowledge and expertise in software development and verification.

Documents

The following documents are available from the RailCons project:

Media

New Video out (9m20s) giving a general presentation of RailCons results and potential.

 

 

A demonstration video shown at the Integrated Formal Methods conference 2016 explains how end-users can benefit from on-the-fly static verification of technical regulations.

 

Summary

Reports predict that due to constant increase in railway traffic in Norway, the state budget will have to allocate 5 billion NOK per year for railway construction works. Considerable savings can be envisaged if even a slight percentage of increase in productivity can be achieved by automating parts of the today's manual tasks involved in the design and construction of railways. Computer software tools for ground works are already well developed for track layout and power catenary lines planning. However, signalling and train routing have had little progress in software tooling. The complex nature of the designs require thoroughly researched methods to be able to automatically verify the correctness and fitness of the design, and to optimize it. The outcome of the RailCons project are tools, based on state-of-the-art methods and technologies, for aiding the design process of railways, focusing initially on the signalling. Automating of consistency checking and optimization of designs according to technical rules and regulations will be the main focus of the work. The signal engineering experts at Railcomplete will provide two projects to be used as reference cases for RailCons:

  • Drammen-Kobbervikdalen station area (planning already started, will be using European Rail Traffic Management System); -
  • Arna-Fløen station area (construction starting in 2018)

MSc opportunities

Many topics related to modelling and designing Railway plans, or to programming tools related to designing and engineering Railway and Railstations. Internship possibilities exist in the company Railcomplete (or other related companies like Norconsult).

Contact any of the affiliated persons.

International Cooperations

Planned international cooperations are with :

Tools

Tools developed by the project are distributed through open code repositories :

  • Verification tools (temporarily unavailable; waiting for the Railcomplete company to update our integration, since their version updates broke our modules)
  • RailCNL tools and preliminary editor
  • Capacity analysis tools: code and documentation
Tags: Railway signalling software, safety checking, interlocking, model checking, constraint solving, software analysis
Published Sep. 5, 2015 9:01 AM - Last modified Apr. 21, 2021 11:49 AM

Participants

Detailed list of participants