Design

The following subsections aim at describing what the WinterTrain is and how it is intended to work. The WinterTrain is a model railway designed to be build and used in a café. Hence there are features which may be neither known nor necessary in a real wold railway. But for a model railway in a café often visited by families with kids (of all ages…), special features make sense.

As the train driver often will be kids, the whole setup has to be easy to understand and not require special training. This leads to following design goals:

• Simple to understand and use
• Robust and tolerant for user misunderstandings and mistakes
• Preventing collision and derailment

In this section various concepts and features of the WinterTrain are described. Each feature is described from a particular point of view. Hence different parts of the WinterTrain may be described in more features.

• Train
  • Operational modes of train
  • Traction control
  • Driver interface
  • Remote take-over of driver interface
  • Train consist and properties
• Train movement
  • Track network
  • Train positioning and direction of movement
  • Train mission and mode authorization
  • Movement authority and train supervision
  • Automatic train operation
  • Shunting area
  • Emergency Stop
• Train routes and signalling
  • Point handling
  • Track occupation / train detection
  • Route state and interlocking
  • Route setting and release
  • Road level crossing, activation and deactivation
  • Signaling
• Railway
  • Operational modes of railway
  • Signaler interface
  • Traffic Management System (TMS): Automatic route setting and time table operation
• Track side elements
  • Balises
  • Signals
  • Point, supervision and locking
  • Road level crossing
  • Track Gates
  • Element controllers (EC)
• System
  • User authentication
  • Maintenance and monitoring
  • System start
• Tools
  • Hand Held terminal
  • Engineering tools
  • Test tools

The above described features and concepts will be structured into a number of sub-systems each taking care of related functions.

The figure to the right and the list below gives an overview of the logical (or functional) structure of the Winter Train v5. Each part will be detailed in the following. : add HHT to the figure.

• Train - The core system of the train
  • OBU, motor control, balise reader etc. - On-Board Unit and subsystems
  • DMI - The Driver Interface
  • Configuration data - Train specific data
  • Notes for Next generation of OBU and DMI
• RBC - The core safety system
  • Interlocking - Route handling
  • RBC - Mode and movement authorization
  • Track side Elements - Points, signals, etc.
  • Element Controller - Controllers for these elements
  • Configuration data - Site and train specific data for the RBC
  • Run time data
• TMS - Train Management System
  • TMS-engine - Automatic route setting and time table operation
  • Time table management
• HMI - The signalers operator interface
  • PC based HMI - Graphical user interface for the RBC
  • Operator panel - Push button user interface for the RBC
• HHT - Hand Held Termianl for track side operations
• Interfaces - Communication protocols
  • OBU - DMI
  • OBU - RBC
  • OBU - Balises
  • RBC - EC
  • RBC - HMI
  • RBC - HHT
  • RBC - MCe
  • RBC - TMS

• Organization of Configuration and application data - Data specifying the actual setup