Communication networks in transportation

Nine Tiles have worked with communications networks for railway signalling, on-train information, fire detection and passenger information systems in airports and underground railways and industrial control networks. This paper briefly reviews some of the transport-related applications and discusses some of the common requirements for communications networks in this field. In the industrial field it has emerged that there are specific requirements for closely coupled control networks which are not met by currently standardised architectures. The network architectures which have been standardised so far were primarily intended for general traffic and are not always capable of providing adequate performance and resilience for time-critical applications. Therefore a task group (TCCA Group) was set up in ISO TC 184/SC5/WG2 to identify the user requirements for time-critical communications systems. Many of these requirements are directly applicable to transport systems. The TCCA report identified the communications requirements of closely coupled control systems where there was a need for bulk data transfers and time-critical messages to coexist on the same network