REGISTER

Bernhard Stamm Senior Sales Engineer

Siemens

The ETCS standard was first developed by the UIC (Union Internationale des Chemins de Fer), then by the EEIG (European Economic Interest Group, an organisation representing Europe's major railways) and finally by UNISIG (Europe's leading signalling suppliers). Due to the complex nature of the ETCS system the process to develop the full standard took quite some time and evolved through a number of releases of the ETCS System Requirement Specification (SRS). The current release (SRS 2.3.0) is the first one that is being used on major cross-border projects, especially on the European rail corridors which are being promoted and partly funded by the European Community. A number of issues were discovered when planning these projects, so that workarounds had to be defined to solve them. New functional requirements were also developed in parallel to make ETCS even more flexible and complete. Both issues will be resolved in the next major release of the System Requirement Specification (SRS 3.0.0), together with the related documents, which will then form the first truly complete and consistent package. This paper briefly describes the process applied to develop the next system version and then discusses some of the major functions that will be included in it, according to today's planning.