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:
- PhD thesis (5,5 Mb): Automated Reasoning for Planning Railway Infrastructure. Bjørnar Luteberget. Defended October 2019.
- Automated Drawing of Railway Schematics using SAT and optimization, Bjørnar Luteberget, Koen Claessen, Christian Johansen. In iFM 2019: 15th International Conference on integrated Formal Methods, December 2019.
- Synthesis of Railway Signaling Layout from Local Capacity Specifications, Bjørnar Luteberget, Christian Johansen, Martin Steffen. In FM 2019: 23rd International Symposium on Formal Methods, October 2019. (Demo Booth also)
- Design-Time Railway Capacity Verification using SAT modulo Discrete Event Simulation, Bjørnar Luteberget, Koen Claessen, Christian Johansen. In 18th Conference on Formal Methods in Computer-Aided Design (FMCAD), November 2018. (Best Paper Award)
- Efficient verification of railway infrastructure designs against standard regulations, Bjørnar Luteberget, Christian Johansen. In Journal on Formal Methods in System Design, Springer, DOI 10.1007/s10703-017-0281-z (recommended citation)
- Participatory Verification of Railway Infrastructure by Representing Regulations in RailCNL, Bjørnar Luteberget, John J. Camilleri, Christian Johansen, Gerardo Schneider. In SEFM 2017: Software Engineering and Formal Methods, Volume 10469 of the series Lecture Notes in Computer Science pp 87-103.
- Participatory Verification of Railway Infrastructure Regulations using RailCNL (long version), Bjørnar Luteberget, John J. Camilleri, Christian Johansen, Gerardo Schneider. University of Oslo, Department of Informatics Research Report 465 (March 2017).
- Rule-Based Incremental Verification Tools Applied to Railway Designs and Regulations, Bjørnar Luteberget, Christian Johansen, Claus Feyling, Martin Steffen. In FM 2016: Formal Methods, Volume 9995 of the series Lecture Notes in Computer Science pp 772-778.
- Automated Verification Of Rules And Regulations Compliance In CAD Models Of Railway Signalling And Interlocking, Bjørnar Luteberget and Claus Feyling. In Computers in Railways XV, pp 153 - 165, WIT Press, 2016.
- Rule-based Consistency Checking of Railway Infrastructure Designs, Bjørnar Luteberget, Christian Johansen, and Martin Steffen. In Integrated Formal Methods, Volume 9681 of the series Lecture Notes in Computer Science pp 491-507. (Best Paper Award)
- Rule-based Consistency Checking of Railway Infrastructure Designs (Long version), Bjørnar Luteberget, Christian Johansen, and Martin Steffen. University of Oslo, Department of Informatics Research Report 450 (January 2016).
- Verification of rules and regulations in CAD models of railway signalling, Bjørnar Luteberget and Christian Johansen, Railcomplete technical white paper (February 2016).
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 :
- Chalmers University - Software Technology Division (SE)
- Darmstadt University - Software Engineering group (DE)
- Oxford University - Knowledge Representation and Reasoning Group (UK)
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