Design Automation for the European Train Control System

The European Train Control System (ETCS) strives to harmonize and improve train control systems throughout Europe. One particular aspect is the utilization of virtual subsections which allow for a much higher degree of freedom and provide significant potential for increasing the efficiency in today’s train schedules. However, exploiting this potential is a highly non-trivial task which, thus far, mainly relied on manual labor. In our work, we aim for introducing methods for design automation which aid designers of corresponding railway networks and train schedules.

In a first attempt, we developed an initial solution which utilizes satisfiability solvers to generate, verify, and optimize train layout and/or schedules. A detailed description of this solution is available in the paper “Towards Automatic Design and Verification for Level 3 of the European Train Control System”.

In a follow-up work, we improved the initital solution for optimizing railway schedules. The details are available in the paper “Optimal Railway Routing Using Virtual Subsections”.

An implementation of these initial solutions are available at https://github.com/cda-tum/da_etcs. In case of questions/problems, please contact us through etcs.cda@xcit.tum.de or create an issue on https://github.com/cda-tum/da_etcs.

If you use the tool for your research, we would be thankful if you referred to it by citing the following publications:

@inproceedings{wille2021etcs,
   title={Towards Automatic Design and Verification for Level 3 of the European Train Control System},
   author={Robert Wille and Tom Peham and Judith Przigoda and Nils Przigoda},
   booktitle={Design, Automation and Test in Europe (DATE)},
   year={2021}
}

@inproceedings{peham2022etcs,
   title={Optimal Railway Routing Using Virtual Subsections},
   author={Tom Peham and Judith Przigoda and Nils Przigoda and Robert Wille},
   booktitle={Reliability, Safety and Security of Railway Systems (RSSRail)},
   year={2022}
}