Cloud Networks for ERTMS Railways Systems (Short Paper)

European Rail Traffic Management System (ERTMS) efficiently manages and schedules the trains guaranteeing passengers safety and service constraints and maximizing railways capacity. The management system is responsible of the elaboration needed to control the trains circulation and to derive the necessary commands for trains and trackside actuators such as railroad switches. These operations need heavy computational resources and require an exchange of information between trains, trackside equipments and elaboration components. Currently the management system is hosted in the Central Control Rooms that centrally manage and supervise trains traffic of different geographical areas. This paper proposes a new paradigm about the execution of the ERTMS management activities taking advantage from cloud networks. It suggests to distribute among cloud resources the computational load due to the elaboration of the collected data and the derivation of required commands for trains and actuators. This can make possible a proactive approach to the trains management, suitable not only to consider the data sent by the trackside equipments, but also the information directly collected onboard of the train. Despite trackside data are considered by the management system, actually they are not integrated with onboard real-time data that are sent to the ground system for diagnosis purposes. These two sources of information can be jointly used to simulate in advance the train transit, deduce possible delays and anomalies and more efficiently manage the trains circulation.