Along with sophistication of society, multifunctionalities of social infrastructure systems and collaboration among the systems are advancing, and the system tends to be complicated. And dependence on the system is also increasing. This trend is no exception for safety critical systems like railway control systems. Conventionally, in safety-critical system, it has been considered that system integrity is the most significant requirement to ensure its safety. Since frequent system expansion involves a risk of impairing the integrity of the system, it is considered desirable to avoid expanding the safety system as much as possible, and extension of the system during operation has been prohibited. For that reason, the construction period for system expansion had been becoming long, and a technology to drastically shorten the construction period was required. In this chapter, as one of the solutions to the issue mentioned above, autonomous decentralized railway control system which has developed and introduced in JR East and its systemconstruction technology is described.

Chapter Contents:

• Abstract
• 2.1 Introduction
• 2.2 Railway control system
• 2.2.1 System structure
• 2.2.2 Issues in conventional railway control system
• 2.3 Signal control system utilized x-by-wire technology
• 2.3.1 Motivation for system change
• 2.3.2 System configuration
• 2.3.2.1 Autonomous decentralized signal control system [4–6]
• 2.3.2.2 Method of control
• 2.3.3 Functions for shorten construction period
• 2.3.3.1 Issues in current constructing procedure
• 2.3.3.2 Assurance technology [7]
• 2.3.3.3 Online test applied assurance technology [8,9]
• 2.4 System configuration technology of autonomous decentralized railway control system
• 2.4.1 Architecture of autonomous decentralized railway control system
• 2.4.1.1 Traffic control DF
• 2.4.1.2 Logic DF
• 2.4.1.3 Device DF
• 2.4.1.4 Emergency DF
• 2.4.2 Heterogeneous real-time autonomously integrating system
• 2.4.2.1 Definition of heterogeneous real-time
• 2.4.2.2 Generic system architecture
• 2.4.2.3 Heterogeneous real-time autonomous transparentizing technology
• 2.4.3 Safety technologies in autonomous decentralized system
• 2.4.3.1 Autonomous safety
• 2.4.3.2 Autonomous fault detecting and safe-side control
• 2.4.3.3 Fault-detection mechanism on content code communication
• 2.4.3.4 Safety control
• 2.4.3.5 Heterogeneous service-level filtering
• 2.5 Future study
• 2.5.1 Expansion for future railway control system
• 2.5.2 Example of flexible route control
• 2.6 Conclusion
• References

Inspec keywords: railway engineering; decentralised control; safety-critical software; railway safety; control engineering computing; rail traffic

Other keywords: frequent system expansion; social infrastructure systems; safety-critical system; system construction technology; autonomous decentralized railway control system; system integrity; JR East

Subjects: Multivariable control systems; Control engineering computing; Computing in other engineering fields; Software engineering techniques; Rail-traffic system control