Thursday, December 20, 2007

Research Work in Solid state Interlocking

The research in the field of solid state interlocking systems data back to 1970s, the first prototypes came in to existence in Britain in the early 80s. In India the research in this area started in the mid 80s by IIT Delhi, the project was funded by RDSO, Lucknow. Prof. Vinod Chandra and Dr. M. Verma were involved in this project. They developed a prototype in which they allocated different Safey Integrity Levels to each module so that the complexity involved in validating the whole system which has only one safety integrity level is solved. The Prototype was developed by 2/2 hardware redundancy Method.

Union switch and Signal Company developed a System with single processor with diverse software method. The Total system had a hot stand by system that would take over if one system failed. Westrace Inc, Australia has implemented the Distributed architecture of SSI where the control is distributed in the Entire Yard as apposed to Centralized Systems
Michele Banci, ISTI - CNR, Formal Methods and Tools Group Pisa, Italy has worked on the method of state charts and graphical method to implement Interlocking.
Dejan Lutovac and Tatjana Lutovac of RMIT University, Melbourne, Australia have worked on generalizing the software and working towards an Universal Interlocking System.
Peter Wigger, Institute for Software, Electronics, Railroad Technology (ISEB), TÜV InterTraffic GmbH, Berlin-Brandenburg Group has worked on the allocating Safety Integrity Level (SIL) in Railway Applications.
Radek Dobias, Hana Kubatova, Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Czech Technical University Prague have worked on the use of FPGAs in safety critical railway applications.
Kotaro Shimamura, Shin’ichiro Yamaguchi of Hitachi Research Laboratory, Hitachi Ltd have worked on fail safe hardware by using dual synthesizable processor cores which gives redundancy in the component level itself
Tomoji Kishi, Natsuko Noda of Software Design Laboratories, NEC Corporation has worked on software architecture, architecture conformance, non-functional properties,
design method, layered system for Interlocking software.

Conclusion:
It is suggested that in the complex field of Railway Signalling, where safety, availability and maintainability are the prime issues, the railway operators must be taken in to confidence and the method applied to design these systems should be reliable, validatable and should create confidence in the railway operators. The Method suggested in the paper describes the method to be employed for design and development of SSIs for safe and reliable operation.

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