REGISTER

Peter Winter Hon. Professor, Dr. Ing. ETH, CompIRSE

SBB Consulting, Berne Switzerland Director of ERTMS at UIC, Paris France

This report gives an update on the evolution of the ETCS and GSM-R development and describes the European and world-wide perspectives for the ERTMS implementation. After phases of studies and specification (1989 – 1996), finalisation of specification, prototyping, tests and pilot applications (1997 – 2004), ETCS is rolled-out since about 2005. UIC has actively supported this process all the time with the vision of obtaining a universal system to be used for all kind of train services: high-speed, conventional mixed traffic and regional service on low density lines.

The ETCS concept is based on open public specifications, which describe a so-called kernel and its interfaces between track and onboard equipment, as well as towards the adjacent subsystems on track and train side. In order to make it universally applicable with all kind of infrastructure equipment, ETCS has been designed with three levels of application, whereby the target level 3 offers significant cost reduction for the infrastructure side and the highest possible line capacity with use of moving blocks. However, it is hardly possible to introduce this concept in one step on the existing networks and traction unit fleets. Therefore, the ETCS levels 1 and 2 have been additionally conceived, which permit the stepwise building up of an ETCS equipped fleet of traction units in view of the generalised ETCS implementation. The report shows that ETCS-products from several suppliers have reached a high degree of maturity.

In Europe, ETCS has been put in regular service on several high-speed lines such as in Spain and in Italy. On major corridor routes in Central and Eastern Europe, joint efforts are made to systematically implement ETCS with financial support by the EU. For application on regional lines, UIC is pushing together with the Swedish rail administration the use of ETCS with level 3, whereby the on-board fully corresponds to the current specification. The examples of China, India, Saudi-Arabia, South Korea and last but not last Australia illustrate that ETCS is also increasingly selected outside of Europe. This is extremely important for obtaining a real breakthrough for large scale procurement at affordable costs under real hard competition.

Like in all highly informatised systems, the specifications for ETCS and GSM-R need to be regularly updated whereby a firm version management must be adopted. In this way, an optimal balance between protection of already realised investments and improvement of the system must be found under the governance of the European Rail Agency. For ETCS, the challenges are the finalisation of the current SRS version 2.3.0 and the merge to the next base-line 3.0.0. GSM-R needs a replacement of the circuit switched data handling for ETCS by more performant and frequency-economic IP based solutions. For the medium term, the EC supported project "Integrated European Signalling system" INESS will bring a re-engineering and further standardisation of trackside equipment especially in context with the radio based application levels 2 and 3.