On the design of a Train Communication Management platform

A train is a complex and dynamic environment. Coaches couple and decouple many times during the day, the direction of travel changes often, as do the scheduled duties and the corresponding needed passenger information. To support the on-board systems in such a dynamic environment, there is a need for a strong and robust management infrastructure. The train management system. As the development of train management systems evolves towards an IP-based approach, a strong connectivity management platform supporting the train management system is needed. We designed and implemented such a connectivity management platform, maintaining and controlling the configuration of the IP-network in the train, and this platform is detailed in this paper. Also, a service layer on top of the IP-network, providing facilities for a logical addressing scheme and event-based asynchronous communication, is presented. It will be shown in the paper that, by using such a connectivity management platform and overlaying service infrastructure, a lot of repetitive, low level programming is avoided. Moreover, the design details are presented to provide a robust and self-healing connectivity management system