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Win Coenraad

Control and Signalling (CCS) systems are expensive to develop, and are even more expensive in terms of system assurance activities and system acceptance. Yet they are developed for a mature market where innovation or product development does not create significant new revenue, neither for suppliers nor for operators, unless they provide improvement in speed, capacity or indeed safety. Typically new products only replace existing product lines. This is true even for ERTMS/ETCS.

The increased speed of technological development and innovation leads to a shorter technical life expectancy. Changing demands for transportation services imply a need for more flexible technical systems, able to adapt "rapidly" to changing performance needs (throughput/capacity, reliability and robustness etc.)

Hence CCS systems will need to be able to be adaptable and upgradeable. The signalling industry/profession cannot hope to meet the demands of its clients, i.e. the train- and rolling stock operators, (local-) governments etc. and perhaps even survive, if the lead-time for development and acceptance and the associated costs are not brought under control.

One of the objectives of the ERTMS/ETCS project is to address this issue, in part, by specifying a harmonised system, for a larger market, applying the principles of interoperability and mandatory crossacceptance of constituents.

In this context it should be interesting to examine ERTMS/ETCS, a system development that started in late 1989 with the founding of UIC/ERRI A200 and is now, more than 17 years onwards, starting to see its first deployments in commercial projects. Whilst specifications are still being finalised, a common factor in the first deployment projects appears to be that none, or not many of them, were completed in time and on budget.

In an effort to learn from the collective experience of both the suppliers, the infrastructure operators and the ultimate users, the passenger and freight operators, I would like to centre the theme for the 2007-2008 technical meetings, the international convention and the technical visits around lessons learned and paths forward towards better control of the cycle time for system development, system and product acceptance and deployment.

For this year’s international convention in the Netherlands, this is the theme chosen for the visits to the Dutch projects.