Towards zero on-site testing: Advanced traffic management & control systems simulation framework including communication KPIs and response to failure events

For the last five years, our research group I2T has worked with OPNET Modeler, a general purpose simulation tool, to build an integrated simulation framework for advanced railroad traffic management and control systems that includes functional and communication layers. We load in our tool the railroad network and its geographic coordinates through a terrain module. We introduce the real train graph schedule. Our simulation framework meets the subset 026 v3.3.0 UNISIG: System Requirement Specification, current ERTMS (European Rail Traffic Management System) specification for high speed lines. We deploy this train control service over different technologies (the standard technology a full stack with X.224, T.70, LAPB and GSM-R) and over TCP/IP next generation telecommunication technologies (LTE, WiMAX, WLAN). By modeling the train control service, we are able to measure how failures or degradation in the communication link affects railroad network availability and operational performance indicators. In our demonstrator, we stress the railroad communication network in different ways and check the behavior of different standardized telecom approaches. The main goal is to reduce the need for extensive field test by using this demonstrator in a laboratory.