A fail-safe microprocessor-based system for interlocking on railways

This paper presents a fail-safe microprocessor-based system for interlocking on railways, which is now installed at Pukou station near Nanjing. The system includes a basic interlocking system and a safety assurance system, taking advantage of completely diverse redundancy. By fault-tree analysis, the system guarantees fail-safety at the behavioral level, and lapses into a safe state, keeping switches stable and changing signals to red to avoid catastrophic failures, when any of the 30 critical conditions happens. Also, the system provides many error report and error log capabilities for maintainability.<<ETX>>

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