1. Project one page description

(Mandatory length: 1 page) Provide, within one page maximum, a strategic description of your proposed project addressing: * the context and goals of the proposal; * the business relevance and the targeted market impact; * the innovative aspects and the major expected technical outcomes; * the consortium relevance.

This project targets the market of the “European Train Control System” (short: ETCS) and in particular it’s “On-Board Units” (short: OBU). ETCS is supposed to replace the legacy “Automatic Train Protection” (short: ATP) and national signalling systems.
Starting back in the late 80th and early 90th the original ideas, operational requirements, and technical concepts of ETCS were developed in a research group initiated by the “Union of international Railways” (UIC: Union de Chemin de Fer) and was based on an openly defined so called “white-box design” approach. The Idea was to design a modular system of building blocks that accommodates one or several the national systems (= Class B Systems), by adding so called “Standard Transmission Modules” (STM) and the new ETCS (= Class A System) functionality all controlled by one single European Vital Computer (EVC), so that a locomotive or multiple unit train set can be equipped with those systems that are needed to cover all networks that the train is expected to operate in. Since almost all Class B systems have been proprietarily specified by the producer and the design protected mostly by patents and the those manufacturers have not opened there interfaces, such “white-box” approach could not be realized within the last quarter of a century. On the other hand for each national ATP system some kind of national interface standards had been established within the last decades. Each national railway system had its own standard, but in many cases protected by patents and therefore not freely usable. Since most of those legacy system designs are several decades old, almost all of those patents are expired. On the other side for each such standard the ATP systems had reached official authorization by proof of safety. The idea of this project is to formally describe the existing class B interface to the train control level and the new to be designed interface between the ETCS OBU and the train control level in a way that proof of safety pproperties can preserved for the class B system and be utilized for the class A system (ETCS). Formalization methodology should be used from the openETCS@ITEA2 project.