Title :
Meeting the challenges in the design and evaluation of a trackside real-time safety-critical system
Author :
Montecchi, Leonardo ; Ceccarelli, Andrea ; Lollini, Paolo ; Bondavalli, Andrea
Author_Institution :
Dept. of Math. & Inf., Univ. of Firenze, Florence, Italy
Abstract :
Highly distributed, autonomous and self-powered systems operating in harsh, outdoors environments face several threats in terms of dependability, timeliness and security, due to the challenging operating conditions determined by the environment. Despite such difficulties, there is an increasing demand to deploy these systems to support critical services, thus calling for severe timeliness, safety, and security requirements. Several challenges need to be faced and overcome. First, the designed architecture must be able to cope with the environmental challenges and satisfy dependability, timeliness and security requirements. Second, the assessment of the system must be carried on despite potentially incomplete field-data, and complex cascading effects that small modifications in system properties and operating conditions may have on the targeted metrics. In this paper we present our experience from the EU-funded project ALARP (A railway automatic track warning system based on distributed personal mobile terminals), which aims to build and validate a distributed, real-time, safety-critical system that detects trains approaching a railway worksite and notifies their arrivals to railway trackside workers. The paper describes the challenges we faced, and the solutions we adopted, when architecting and evaluating the ALARP system.
Keywords :
alarm systems; mobile radio; object detection; occupational safety; rail traffic; railway engineering; railway rolling stock; railway safety; ALARP system; EU-funded project; complex cascading effects; critical services; dependability requirement; distributed personal mobile terminals; distributed real-time safety-critical system; environmental challenges; harsh outdoor environments; highly distributed autonomous self-powered systems; operating conditions; railway automatic track warning system; railway trackside workers; railway worksite; safety requirement; security requirement; system deployment; timeliness requirement; trackside real-time safety-critical system; train arrival notification; train detection; Global Positioning System; Mobile communication; Monitoring; Reliability; Safety; Security; Synchronization; ALARP; architecture; challenges; evaluation; railway; real-time; safety-critical;
Conference_Titel :
Object/Component/Service-Oriented Real-Time Distributed Computing (ISORC), 2013 IEEE 16th International Symposium on
Conference_Location :
Paderborn
DOI :
10.1109/ISORC.2013.6913237