REGISTER

Wee Meng SIM MIES, MIEE, MCIBSE, C Eng

Land Transport Authority, Singapore

and 1 depot. From the HarbourFront, located on the southern part of Singapore, NEL runs towards the north-east, passing through the Central Business District, corridor of Serangoon Road and to the new towns of Hougang, Sengkang and Punggol. The depot is located at Sengkang and serves as the operating company headquarter, stabling yard and operation control centre for both the mainline and depot.

The paper describes the key consideration and engineering requirements for a fully automated driverless system. It gives some insights to the four main core systems, namely, the rolling stock, signaling, communications and integrated supervisory control systems. The successful integration of these four systems is of paramount importance to the successful implementation of a fully automated driverless system. The overview of the four core systems will be discussed.

As NEL is a system with a high level of complexity, the project demands a need to adopt a system approach throughout the design, construction, testing and commissioning phases of all the electrical and mechanical systems. The paper will discuss briefly on the approach taken that led to the successful implementation of the project. The NEL system was opened for revenue service since 20Ih June 2003 and has been consistently achieving a system availability of 99.90%.