Toward developing a Decentralized Railway Signalling System Using Petri Nets

Railway interlocking systems ensure the safe operation of trains in stations by controlling sets of devices and equipment. Component-based decentralized railway interlocking system (CBDRIS) is a recently presented railway signalling in which component-based technology is applied. For such a safety-critical real-time system, fail-safe and fault-tolerance have to be ensured. In this paper, a Petri net-based development strategy of CBDRIS is proposed. The development strategy separates the development process into dynamical process (Standardizing hardware as well as control flow of interlocking device components) and static process (Converting current interlocking table of a specific station to a unified format for CBDRIS). In addition, hardware and software fault-tolerance measures adopted in CBDRIS are described respectively.