The Driver Information System (DIS) - UIC · The DIS not only records the signals and the physical quantities that are today present in the tachigraphic logging - space, time and

* FS - Trenitalia - Unità Tecnologie Materiale RotabileViale S. Lavagnini, 58I-50129 Firenze (Italy)Phone: ++390552353602Fax: ++390552353581E-Mail: [email protected]

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The Driver Information System (DIS)Doct. Eng.Gianfranco Cau*

FS - Trenitalia - Unità Tecnologie Materiale Rotabile

The DIS is a new complete system used on the FS fleet which records and elaborates on a black box all the operationsdone by the driver on board of trains, transmits them to ground, where they are automatically verified and classified andallows a whole control on the journey.

THE CONTEXTBy all operators, a great part of the railway regulation to drive trains makes reference to thetravelling speed, which shall be available to the driver on the desk of locomotives, steering coaches,EMU etc. with great precision. In particular, the tachimeter, which constitutes the last ring of themeasurement chain, must have characteristics that do not generate any doubt on the truth of theshown information, i.e. the reading value and on the state of efficiency of the instrument. The DIS(Driver Information System), studied inside the Technical Direction of U.T.M.R., not only allows toknow with a high level of safety the speed of the train, but also extends and increases theacquisition of the exploitation and driving conditions of the different compositions.

The DIS not only records the signals and the physical quantities that are today present in thetachigraphic logging - space, time and the outputs of the safety signalling apparatus - but it is alsocompletely interfaced to the devices on which the driver acts on and which constitutes the “drivingevents”.

Thanks to the current technical possibilities the architecture chosen is capable to add furtherfunctionality which opens the way to very new services for the elaboration and the analysis of traveldata associated to trains running and it is easy to understand which patrimony of knowledge thisamount of data represents.

In synthesis the DIS is designed to collect, to transmit to ground and to manage the data generatedby the driver on board of railway vehicles and allows to get higher potentiality in comparison toanalogous systems currently available, with respect to the quality, the nature and the quantity of theacquired information; in this way a substitution of the traditional and limited registration on paperin favour of an electronic storage according the most recent technologies is possible.

The architecture of the DIS is intrinsically distributed because it is constituted on one hand by on-board systems which automatically transmits by radio to ground the data while, on the other hand,the ground infrastructure is spread on the whole Italian country and it is responsible to build acentralised database of the received information and to classify the journeys from the normativepoint of view.

The data are available both on ground and stored also in the so called legal memory or black boxwhich contains the recent history of the operations done on the train. This is examined only in caseof accident and is constructed to support very high temperatures and hard environmental conditions.

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It is therefore clear that sophisticated analysis and proper assumptions have been done to guaranteethe legal validity of the information obtained through this way: in fact the data flux respects thedirectives issued by the Italian Authority for Computer Technology and its Applications.

THE ARCHITECTUREThe on board DIS equipment samples driving events, transfers them via radio and stores the mostrecent part into the black box. The radio connection takes place among a set of peripheral radio, onefor each vehicle, and the peripheral radio base sites which are located in the most important railwayworkshops. Then each peripheral site is linked to a central site through a geographical coveragenetwork to centralise the collected information, elaborate them and transfer again to the sitesaccording to the different applications. The connection among the peripheral radios and the radiobase sites is not continuous because the used frequency band implies optical propagation - these aremicrowave in the band of 2.4 GHz: this condition requires an automatic mechanism to activate thetransmission if the vehicle is under radio coverage.This way of working describes the main DIS procedure, is totally transparent for the operators anddoes not requires any manual activation or synchronisation. Then the vehicles maintain the storedata until their arrival into an equipped location, where the automatic radio transmission to groundhappens, independently from the belonging or not of the vehicle to that workshop. For example, inpicture number 1, this is true for the locomotives named Va2, Va3 e Vb1 in the Radio Base StationA which covers the Peripheral site A.

The architecture of the DIS.



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Therefore the data transmission may be spatially and temporally shared, even if the minimalconsidered unit of transferring is equal to the zone, corresponding to a complete session of a givendriver.The ground system operates out of line and is responsible of the organisation of the received dataaccording to a predefined logic and decides whether to mark the zones for a further analysis, to sendto the central site for the final memorisation in archives or to perform query to selected vehicles inorder to find specific anomalies.

THE SUBSYSTEMSThe subsystems that forms the DIS are the tachimetry, the event recorder with the black box (whichfrom the physical point of view compose all together the Event Recorder ER), the remote terminal(RT), the communication computer (CC), the radio (R) and the test and service equipment (TSE) -see picture number 2.

The subsystems of the DIS - block diagram.

The ER stores the information coming from the tachimetry, from the signalling equipment, from thedriver’s desk equipment, the GPS receiver and the vehicle logic. The DIS has a rich set of externalinterfaces in order to be installed on very different families of vehicle.Once it is stored with proper strategies in the vehicle, the information is transferred to ground if theis the coverage of a radio base station: the correct routing and transmission are managed by the CCwhich is responsible for the optimisation of the related procedure. The system is always suppliedand, to limit the vehicle battery consumption, a low consumption stand-by mode is foreseen fromwhich it is possible to pass to the normal operation. In this stand-by mode it is continuouslymonitored the presence of the radio link: in case there are the conditions to activate the datadownload, this is done passing to the normal operation state. In the same manner the system canpass to the full operative state also when the ground radio wants to send a selective message to awell precise vehicle; this function is used to update on board configuration or software undercontrolled procedures, too. Each failure of the on board equipment is shown on the driver’s desk.



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When the ground system has received the single tachygraphic electronic zones (TEZ),acknowledges the correct, complete and referenced reception to the board equipment and re-directthem to the server of the respective peripheral ground site. The data transfer of a vehicle takes placesending one or more files, TEZ, containing the chronological events recording organised insequential records which substitutes the present paper zones. In order to administer the storage andthe routing of the TEZ in the CC , each one of them is identified with an attribute on its status.There are these types of TEZ (see fig.3):

Types of TEZ.

THE FUNCTIONALITYThe functionality of the DIS are summarised in the following table and the data flux is in picturenumber 4.

TACHIMETER•

• Signal elaboration of frequency generator outputs• Calculation of the run space from speed samples• Piloting of safe speed indicators• Speed correction according to wheels diameter

EVENT RECORDER • Data recording on a solid state black box• Data exchange through the remote terminal• Visualisation of time and emergency speed• Transfer of all sampled data to the communication

computer• System configuration by serial interface

COMMUNICATIONCOMPUTER

• Reception of sampled data in asynchronous way• Radio data transfer with TCP/IP on IEEE 802.3• Coding, encryption, flow control, fleet manag., etc.• Managing of FTP protocol• Data transfer optimisation• Local data download

RADIO • Communication according to IEEE 802.11• Complete radio coverage inside FS areas



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TEST & SERVICEEQUIPMENT

• System tuning and test of all functionality• Ground system emulation• Monitor, diagnostic, maintenance & performance

measurements• Radio coverage verification

The data flux.

Particular care has been taken to manage data in relation to their safety: some concepts oncompression and encryption is reported in picture number 5.



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DIS data compression and encryption.



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THE STATE OF THE ART-CONCLUSIONSHere are reported some picture which better than words describe the degree of development reachedby this big project.

The first equipped vehicle: loco E652.159.



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The DIS on board equipment.

The man-machine interface TR.



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The ground site in Bologna workshop.



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The firs prototype of speed indicator.

Even if FS is at the beginning of the application of this system, which bycompleteness and functionality does not find similar example by the European RailwayOperators, the installation of the ground sites has been completed and that of the first500 on board apparatus is going on. This correspond to the initial part of a programconcerning all FS - TRENITALIA vehicles with driver's desk.

The DIS is so destined to constitute the new standard for the tachimetry, drivingevents collection, their analysis and storage for a long period. For this reason the systemhas been conceived in order to give the user the maximum of flexibility so that it issuitable to be installed both in existing rolling stock as well in the new ones.

The introduction of the black box supply in any case an accurate recording of allparameters of the driving and gives an important contribute to the global process ofsafety.


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The Driver Information System (DIS) - UIC · The DIS not only records the signals and the physical quantities that are today present in the tachigraphic logging - space, time and