A Topology-Based Model for Railway Train Control Systems

An innovative topology-based method for modeling railway train control systems is proposed in this paper. The method addresses the problems of having to rely too much on designers´ experience and of incurring excessive cost of validation and verification in the development of railway train control systems. Four topics are discussed in the paper: 1) the definition of basic topological units for modeling railway networks, based on the essential characteristics of these units; 2) the concept of a train movement authority topological space; 3) the interpretation of the train control logic as a topological space construct; and 4) topological space theorems for train control system verification. A case study is also presented, where the approach was applied in the simulation model of a typical railway network, and the results show good performance, which meets the system requirements.