This paper was published in 2013 which describes about role of ICT in driverless, automated railway operations

1. 490 Int. J. Logistics Systems and Management, Vol. 14, No. 4, 2013
Copyright © 2013 Inderscience Enterprises Ltd.
The roles of ICT in driverless, automated railway
operations
Sundaravalli Narayanaswami*
Higher Colleges of Technology,
PB No. 41012, ADWC,
Abu Dhabi, UAE
E-mail: SNarayanaswami@hct.ac.ae
*Corresponding author
Shiv Mohan
Serco Middle East,
Post Box-9197, Dubai, UAE
E-mail: mohan_shiv2003@yahoo.co.in
Abstract: Transportation plays an important role in building supply chains;
several emerging theories and practices of supply chain management rely
heavily on transportation. In recent years, ICT has been favourably employed
in engineering, operations and business sectors. However applications and
opportunities of ICT are still evolving; with reference to ICT, today’s norm is
obsolete tomorrow. Rail transport too is becoming increasingly dependent on
ICT, not only for commercial purposes such as asset management, passenger
ticketing and information broadcasting etc., but also for mission/safety-critical
functions, particularly in infrastructure development in the era of high speed
and automated railways. A critical issue is that railway infrastructure is capital
intensive and has a long gestation period. The initial effort and cost of
developing ICT for safety/mission critical railway applications are high and
detailed planning is necessary to study requirements and product specifications.
The ever evolving ICT standards contribute to high cost over-runs and long
lead time. Whilst the rail industry has embraced the technology of the day,
several ICT advancements remain unexplored by railways; financial and
technical mishaps tend to make one cautious. This paper analyses automated
rail operational technology in-depth and the role of ICT in a broader overview
of enhancing transportation capacity.
Keywords: information and communication technology; ICT; driverless train;
automatic train control; ATC; automatic train operation; ATO; automatic train
protection; ATP; automatic train supervision; ATS.
Reference to this paper should be made as follows: Narayanaswami, S. and
Mohan, S. (2013) ‘The roles of ICT in driverless, automated railway
operations’, Int. J. Logistics Systems and Management, Vol. 14, No. 4,
pp.490–503.
Biographical notes: Sundaravalli Narayanaswami is a Faculty at the IT
Department of Higher Colleges of Technology, Abu Dhabi, UAE. She has a
PhD in Industrial Engineering and Operations Research from IIT Bombay,
Masters in Computer Engineering and Bachelors’ in Electronics and

2. The roles of ICT in driverless, automated railway operations 491
Communication Engineering. Her research areas are scheduling and
rescheduling disrupted railway traffic and modelling using linear programming,
heuristic and intelligent agents approaches. She teaches courses in IT, OR and
management. Apart from publishing and reviewing journals, she has authored a
book on transportation models. She is a Fellow of the British Computer Society
(BCS) and is on the board of BCS-Middle-East Region.
Shiv Mohan is an Automatic Train Control Manager in Serco Middle East on
Dubai Metro Project. He holds a Bachelor in Electronics and Instrumentation
Engineering. He is a Chartered Engineer from Engineering Council UK and
member of Institution of Railway Signal Engineers UK. He is experienced in
multi-disciplinary railway industry, railway signalling design, requirement
management, installation, testing and commissioning, systems verification and
validation of railway operations and maintenance. His research areas are
improving capacity and efficiency by automatic train control systems and metro
railway signalling. He has published his research in IRSE ASPECT on the topic
of metro signalling revolution in India, Dubai Metro Signalling and Train
Control System.
1 Introduction
A short asset life and high development costs make ICT less attractive for mission-
critical applications, but the capability to do much, does. Rail industry has been an early
adopter of ICT for the management and control of trains on a railway network; so much
that railways and ICT have evolved together from basic signalling through fibre-optic,
wireless and Bluetooth technology to driverless operations. In earlier times, traffic
density was much less and trains were operated manually with line-side signalling. As
years progressed, traffic has increased in large proportions in several large cities all over
the world. Productivity and business growth have largely improved with railways, which
in turn has grown tremendously with high-speed, automatically operated trains (Couto,
2011). To cope with the huge traffic density, it became necessary to maximise capacity
utilisation of available infrastructure and thus frequency of train operations was increased
with reduced inter-train distance. To ensure safe and reliable train operations, many
countries incorporated automatic train control with driverless trains, predominantly in the
Metro traffic. However available articles on automatic railway operations are vendor
distributed with specific product features and they fail to edify the know-how seeking
readership. Therefore, we were driven to prepare one ourselves. It is interesting to note
that lack of advanced ICT tools has been reasoned out for the advances in intelligent
transportation (Coronado Mondragon et al., 2012). Whereas we understand that there is a
lacuna of academic writing on ICT tools in transportation and per-se, ICT itself greatly
contributes to intelligent transportation. This paper covers a range of automatic railway
operations from an Industry perspective. Specifically we discuss the roles of ICT in
driverless train operations and the impact of ICT in increasing safety, efficiency,
reliability and capacity management. Critical mishaps that have happened due to ICT
failures in another transportation mode (airways) and further extent of ICT possibilities
with reference to few automatic railway networks are discussed.

3. 492 S. Narayanaswami and S. Mohan
2 Related literature
High speed railways and automatic train control system projects are being implemented
all over the World. Available literature on automatic train operations (ATOs) are majorly
vendor published with detailed product features and specifications. Research articles on
the topic cover specific technological features of the systems, such as security, reliability
of operations, communication systems within the railway systems. In this section, we
discuss some of the recent papers and conclude this section with the focus of our article.
The Shinkansen (also known as the Bullet Train), is a network of high-speed railway
lines in Japan. The Shinkansen railway, started in 60’s has expanded currently to
2,387.7 km (1,483.6 mi) of lines with maximum speeds of 240–300 km/h
(149–186 mph). The network presently links most major cities on the islands of Honshu
and Kyushu and plans are underway to increase speeds up to 320 km/h (199 mph).Test
runs have reached 443 km/h (275 mph) for conventional rail in 1996, and up to a world
record 581 km/h (361 mph) for maglev train-sets in 2003 (Yasui, 2006). Automatic trains
are operated reliably at high speeds due to sophisticated ICT systems in them, which
manually operated trains, are not capable of attaining. Majorly ICT tools are deployed for
the entire monitoring, control and supervision of train movements in the territory; all
systems hence are based on well-built communication networks. Issues arising out of
system failures are many and effects of system failures are highly critical and hazardous.
Vuaillat (2006) has provided a detailed overview of challenges of applying Information
technologies-based systems in railways and other public transportation systems. Daviesa
et al. (2007) have presented the effects of automatic rail operations, specific to UK. The
foremost issue in transportation management is safety and reliability of operations and
many automatic transportation systems, including that of railways confirm to standards
and specifications as in Smith and Simpson (2010). Safety of automatic control systems
is presented in Guenab et al. (2009), by identifications, mitigation and elimination of
risks-based approach. A simulation-based study and analysis of safety systems is
presented in Gimenes et al. (2006). Specific to Japanese railways, Matsumoto et al.
(2002) have presented in details on interactions and messages communication between
the central control system and trains on movement using computers inside the trains.
Matsuki et al. (2004) have presented a detailed overview of train interlocking and
protection in digital automatic train control systems with reference to Shinakensen
railways. Coronado Mondragon et al. (2009) have discussed about the roles of wireless
communication systems in transportation operations. He further discussed the
effectiveness of wireless communication in distributing traffic through multi-modes of
services. Coronado Mondragon et al. (2012) is a later extension of wireless network
capabilities in sea-mode of traffic and incorporating intelligent control systems in traffic
coordination. Transportation operations are planned at four hierarchical levels, namely
strategic, tactical, operational control and real-time control. Automatic train control
transportation operations are classified as real-time operations, generally. However, all
other operations that are involved in high-speed railways that fall under all the four levels
of hierarchy are discussed in Ortega (2012). Signalling systems are key components of
railway operations, both in manually operated heavy rails and automatically operated
light rails. Several types of signalling systems are deployed and Hwang et al. (2008) have
presented automatic testing procedures that are employed in multiple signalling systems.

4. The roles of ICT in driverless, automated railway operations 493
In spite of the risks and challenges of automatic railway operations, business
advantages out of high speed railways largely overcome the high initial investments.
Couto (2011) has discussed growth in European railway productivity that resulted out of
high speed train operations. In particular, high speed railways make a huge impact on the
traffic capacity in cities which is discussed by Ricci (2011). Tierney (2012) has discussed
the roles of high speed railway towards improving the knowledge economy and living
standards of a country in a managerial context.
In a variety of articles available as academic research publications, we identified a
lacuna of discussions on overall system perspective of automatic railway operations.
Additionally, automatic railway operations hugely rely on sophisticated ICT systems that
demand a strategic vision, heavy initial investments and detailed implementation plans.
Our paper presents a complete overview of fundamental operations involved in ATOs,
their system level classifications, interaction between the multiple sub-systems and roles
of ICT in each and every aspect of these sub-systems. ICT systems are not immune to
system failures, and we present several mishaps involved in ICT systems. Still we
observe that much more can be drawn from ATC systems towards capacity
enhancements. We report our observations with key evidences from the industry.
The hierarchy of train operations is presented in details in Section 3. The three main
subsystems of ATOs are discussed in a detailed manner in Section 4, and Section 5
covers several key features of these three subsystems along with their standards and
specifications, wherever applicable. Automatic trains have been deployed successfully in
several cities all over the globe and as evidence we present system features of three
distinct automatic metro railways systems and present in brief the uniqueness of the three
examples in Section 6. Challenges and issues in developing and deploying Automatic
train systems using ICT are several and we present then comprehensively in Section 7.
ICT systems are prone to failures and mishaps and in Section 8, we list out some of the
major system failures and briefly state the lessons to be learnt in future systems out of
those failures. We conclude our article in Section 9, our observations on further
possibilities of ICT-based ATOs, inspite of several challenges and threats.
3 System overview: operational hierarchy
Automated, driver-less railways are complex systems that involve coordination of
multiple operations communicated and controlled at various levels. To present a broader
and clear overview, we term the system as communication-based train control (CBTC)
and classify the entire system into three levels of hierarchies. Strategic and tactical
decisions are taken at the highest level of hierarchy, which is management level. Overall
system management and control, based on policies and procedures are taken at this level.
Decisions taken at this level are implemented on a short and long term periodicity at the
lower hierarchies. Emergency level operations are also based on policies at the highest
level. The next level is the operation level, which is handled by the vehicular control
centre. The control centre is the nerve centre for train operations, which houses relevant
controller consoles, track diagram panels/VDUs and required communication and
maintenance facilities of other departments. The control centre monitors train trajectories
on a real-time basis through huge display screens. Communications links are set up

5. 494 S. Narayanaswami and S. Mohan
between the vehicular control centre and the stations and all trains in the operational
domain. If a contingency arises, the vehicular control centre offers localised control
instructions or executes an emergency relief operation, based on management policies. At
the lowest hierarchy is the activation level which comprises three main units. The
activation level includes multiple sub-systems to ensure safety, reliability and superior
quality of transportation services. ICT devices and technology are more predominantly
employed at the activation and we present in Figure 1 the system components in the
activation level. There are three major hardware units in the activation level and they are
1 the ATC on-board equipment, inside train units
2 interface units throughout the tracks
3 station control performed by the ATC station equipment.
The two grey boxes in Figure 1 represent the on-board control unit and station control
unit. Other components shown in the figure denote the interface units deployed through
the tracks and communication set-up between the three units. Each unit has specific tasks
to be executed, the more vital ones for safe and reliable train operations will be discussed
in this paper. At each hierarchy, standards of operational safety are prescribed by safety
integrity level (SIL), which is discussed in a later section. In the section that follows, we
present three major sub-systems of CBTC that use the hardware systems for specific
operations and control.
Figure 1 System components in activation level

6. The roles of ICT in driverless, automated railway operations 495
4 Subsystems: ATP, ATO and ATS
Figure 1 in Section 3 illustrates the hardware devices in the activation level and in this
section we discuss three major processes that are computationally deployed through
CBTC. They are automatic train protection (ATP), ATO (Yasui, 2006) and automatic
train supervision (ATS). The three systems are involved in protection of train rolling
stock, automatic operations of trains and supervisory control of transportation in a
localised control, respectively. Detailed operations of the three sub-systems are tabulated
below.
Table 1 Functions of different Sub-systems of ATC
Functions of sub-systems
ATP ATO ATS
Continuous detection of the
position of a train
Speed regulation Dispatching of trains
Communication of inter-train
distance on the tracks
Halt trains accurately at
stations
Adjustment of station dwell
time
Measuring and monitoring of train
running speed
Execution of signal stops Provision of output to platform
indicators and/or other
passenger/management
information media
Display of target speed and target
distance at main machine interface
Automatic restart from
signal stops.
Commands to station
interlocking
Evaluation and display of
maximum permissible speed
depending upon target
speed/distance, train characteristics
and terrain
Indication of open/close
doors to train operators
and motormen
Computation of train
schedules
Application of brake if speed of
train exceeds the safety limit
Monitoring of train position
and movements
Detection of ‘roll back’ of the train
and braking during a contingency
Display of train service status
to train controllers
Ensure train deceleration rate for
braking is reached within specified
time of service brake application,
otherwise application of emergency
braking
Logging and compilation of
records
Execution of instructions
received from train controllers
Interface with other sub
systems such as train radio
Operation within standards
Operation within ATS
standards
Operation within ATS
standards
Notes: As observed from the table, the three process systems are involved in ATOs,
supervision and control and all three systems confirm to International Automatic
train systems standards.

7. 496 S. Narayanaswami and S. Mohan
5 Features
Each subsystem ensures safe and reliable train operations. In this section, several features
that make up the larger sub-system of automatic train control are listed and discussed.
Figure 2 Automatic speed control of trains
a Centralised control. The modern CBTC system operates with digital communication
systems (Matsuki, et al., 2004) and on-board computational facilities. Figure 2
represents automatic speed control of trains for safe operations by dynamically
computing inter-train distances. Antennae/Loop installed on trackside continuously
monitor train positions (Coronado Mondragon et al., 2009) and movements. Ground
equipment calculates the furthest block to which train can travel safely (stopping
point), which is transmitted to the train as a digital signal. Based on the stopping
point information received from the ground equipment, the on-board equipment
retrieves the permissible speed-profile (braking profile) using the on-board database.
The actual running speed and train position are continuously evaluated against the
permitted speed profiles and automatic braking is applied when necessary.
b Train movements and headway. Automatically operated trains are capable of running
at very high speeds ranging upto 300 km/hr. and a headway in seconds can be
maintained. Currently driverless trains are operated as Metro in many cities all over
the World, where inter-station distances are very small and small stoppage times at
stations. This requires an efficient and smooth braking system and also a large

8. The roles of ICT in driverless, automated railway operations 497
acceleration profile characteristics. Distance between trains is smaller and the track
layouts are simpler than in conventional railways.
c Signaling systems. Operation of trains is through moving block systems (Hwang
et al., 2008), in which a following train travels at a speed commensurate with the
proceeding train such that the following train can always stop clear of the rear of the
preceding train. A large headway is required for safe train operations in such a
system. CBTC, along with the sub-systems ATP, ATO and ATS is capable of safe
train operations with very small headways in the range of up to 90–100 seconds.
d Ground equipment. Ground equipment is composed of logic controllers,
transmitter/receiver units and interfaces with interlocking systems. A logic controller
is placed at each station with an interlocking system and it covers the area including
that station and adjacent stations without interlocking systems. Transmitter/receiver
units are distributed to all stations and connected to the track circuits. Logic
controllers and transmitter/receiver units are fail-safe systems.
e On-board equipment. On trains, every car with a driving cab is fitted with a control
unit, a transponder digital processing unit and an inspection unit. The control unit
receives ATC signal sent through rails and controls train speed. Transponder digital
processing unit receives information from transponders mounted between the rails.
The inspection unit registers status of the train continuously for timely diagnosis of
failures and automatic inspection of on-board equipment. The control unit is
generally composed of two sets of fail-safe devices to enable normal train operation
even when one set has failed. Transponder digital processing unit and the on-board
database also have a duplex configuration. Braking patterns are stored in the
database and online equipment retrieves appropriate braking pattern when stopping
point information is received.
f Maintenance. The modern CBTC System is maintenance friendly. The ATC System
supports greater throughput with less equipment, Greater fault management
handling, Remote reset functionalities, in-built redundancy. The ATC system is
maintained as per supplier recommendation and best practices of industry.
Preventive maintenance is performed to retain a system in satisfactory operational
condition by inspecting the system, detecting and preventing incipient failures,
calibration, regular checks and cleaning. Corrective maintenance comprises the
activities performed to restore an item to satisfactory condition after a malfunction or
failure has caused degradation of the item below the specified performance.
Effective maintenance is very important to achieve the safe, smooth and world class
train service. Effective maintenance Regime helps extension of asset life cycle and
reduction in asset life cycle costing.
g Switch motor control board. The control software and data for switch motor control
are separately installed into the ATC logic unit (Matsumoto et al., 2002) and the
switch motor control boards in the same manner of the signal light control case. The
ATC logic unit is loaded the data of every type of the switch machines, number of
tight contact checker of every point. The roles of the switch motor control board are
to control the switch direction and power supply for switch motor and to monitor the
state of switch machine.

9. 498 S. Narayanaswami and S. Mohan
h Docking and automatic door opening. Modern CBTC system provides fine
positioning and fine station stopping accuracy. When the train docked correctly at
station and the zero speed detection is achieved, Train onboard system gives signal
to wayside equipment to open PSD and rolling stock to open the train door. CBTC
system takes care of undershoot and overshoot. Automatic train jog back/forward
function is provided to cater train undershoot and overshoot.
i Platform screen door (PSDs), PIDs, voice enabled assistance. PSD’s are used in
recent Metro rails in Asia and Europe. They are full height, total barriers between the
station floor and ceiling, while platform edge doors are full height, but do not reach
the ceiling and thus do not create a total barrier. Both types of doors help to:
• Prevent accidental falls off the platform onto the lower track area, suicide
attempts and homicides by pushing.
• Prevent or reduce wind felt by the passengers caused by the Piston effect which
could in some circumstances make people fall over
• Reduce the risk of accidents, especially from service trains passing through the
station at high speeds (Guenab, et al., 2009).
• Improve climate control within the station (heating, ventilation, and air
conditioning are more effective when the station is physically isolated from the
tunnel).
• Improve security – access to the tracks and tunnels is restricted.
• Lower costs – eliminate the need for motormen or conductors when used in
conjunction with ATO, thereby reducing manpower costs.
• Prevent litter build up on the track which can be a fire risk. Platform information
display (PID’s) are display systems used in stations and within trains for
periodic information announcements. In many countries, owing to support
visually challenged commuters, PID’s are supplemented with voice-enabled
announcements in the trains and stations.
j Disruptions handling. Disruptions are handled in broadly two approaches – either by
the train operators and traffic controllers at the control centre or manually
(and physically) by the human dispatchers.
k Testing/simulated runs. Simulation techniques are employed to test the various
sub-systems. An interested reader is directed to Gimenes et al. (2006) for further
reading on simulation-based testing schemes. Test equipment is composed of
systems to set substitute block route and various monitoring units. Some of the units
are regular communication server, track communication server, radio logic controller
and radio units which are connected with ISDN at very high speeds.
l Standards. All hardware and software subscribe to CENELEC1
and SIL standards
(Smith and Simpson, 2010). Different vendors produce products with different level
of SIL standards. Table 2 specifies certain evaluation measures and SIL standards for
the same. Probability of failure on demand (PFD) and risk reduction factor (RRF) of
low demand operation for different SILs are shown in Table 2 and Table 3.

10. The roles of ICT in driverless, automated railway operations 499
Table 2 SIL standards for PFD and RRF
SIL PFD PFD (power) RRF
1 0.1–0.01 10−1
–10−2
10–100
2 0.01–0.001 10−2
–10−3
100–1000
3 0.001–0.0001 10−3
–10−4
1000–10,000
4 0.0001–0.00001 10−4
–10−5
10,000–100,000
For continuous operation, the SIL standards of probability of failure per hour (PFH) are
applied.
Table 3 SIL standards for PFH and RRF
SIL PFH PFH (power) RRF
1 0.00001–0.000001 10−5
–10−6
100,000–1,000,000
2 0.000001–0.0000001 10−6
–10−7
1,000,000–10,000,000
3 0.0000001–0.00000001 10−7
–10−8
10,000,000–100,000,000
4 0.00000001–0.000000001 10−8
–10−9
100,000,000–1,000,000,000
Currently all the vital systems which are responsible for safety are designed as per SIL4.
We summarise this section with a remark that in automatic driver-less trains, ICT
hardware and software ensure safe, reliable transportation services, in addition to superior
service quality.
Table 4 Design and operational features of three key automated railway operations
Features
Dubai metro
(red and green line)
North east and circle
line Singapore
Paris metro line
(Line 1)
Maximum design speed 90 kph 100 kph 80 kph
Currently operated maximum
running speed
80 kph 80 kph 70 kph
Designed headway in
seconds
90 seconds 90 seconds 85 seconds
Currently operated minimum
headway in seconds
240 seconds 120–240 seconds 120–240 seconds
Typical inter station distance 1 to 1.5 km 1 to 1.5 km Less than 1 km
Length of the system 72.6 km 55 km 16.6 km
Total Stations 47 51 25
Typical dwell time at stations 20 seconds 20 seconds 15–20 seconds
Typical block distance Moving block
depends on speed
and gradient
Moving block Moving block
Stooping accuracy +/–250 mm +/–300 mm +/–300 mm and
less
Signalling system supplier Thales (Seltrac IS) ALSTOM
(URBALIS 300)
SIEMENS
(Trainguard MT)
Operator Serco SBS transit(NEL)
SMRT (circle line)
RATP

11. 500 S. Narayanaswami and S. Mohan
6 Industrial exemplifications
In the previous sections, we discussed the operational and technical details of automatic
train control system. In this section, we present some key design and operational
specifications of three successful automatic train control projects in the World in Table 4.
Later in the section, we report our interpretations based on tabulated data.
Two data from the table are most interesting; one is the running speed and second is
the headway. Both design and operational quantities of both data are presented in the
table. Headway is the safe time difference between two successive trains, so that there is
no collision. As can be observed the difference between the design speed and the
operational speed is large in all three ATC projects. Similarly the headway distance of
design and operational quantities of all three metro projects are significant. We interpret
that all three systems are designed for much higher capacity handling and operationally
much less is being utilised. With the help of improved ICT, the operational capacity can
be much increased. For minimising headway to serve maximum PHPDT, ICT plays a
major role.
7 Challenges in ICT implementation
In the previous sections, we discussed the operational hierarchy of ATOs and then
discussed in more details about the activation level at the lowest hierarchy, further into
system level components of the activation level and technical features and international
standards that contribute to safe, reliable and high quality of services in ATOs.
Specifically to three successful driverless projects in Asia and Europe, we presented few
design and operational characteristics. It is imperative that ICT has contributed much to
safety and reliability and has enabled to increase system efficiency. However, ICT
implementations are not devoid of challenges. In this section, some of the major setbacks
before initiating, during and after implementation of an ICT project are presented.
Developments in ICT are too rapid for practitioners to learn, develop and maintain
skills and there is always a lack of skilled practitioners to specify, design, build, test,
verify and validate ICT in the context of particular domains. ICT standards also continue
to evolve but with too many contradictory requirements across different developers
(Vuaillat, 2006). As software is not a physical artefact, most ICT standards are
process-based and are based on the assumption that more rigorous the processes are, the
lower is the likelihood of latent errors. Hence longer time is required to develop ICT
applications and the costs escalate further. ICT systems developed for railways are often
bespoke, that testing is limited to verify what is intended of the system; it is almost
impossible to verify that ICT systems do not do anything that is not intended.
Compatibility of products developed by different vendors is almost non-existent.
Moreover, ICT practitioners often have no knowledge of the particular application
domain and those with domain knowledge generally do not possess any ICT skills, which
make ICT applications prone to a high risk of errors, misunderstandings and omissions.
Several studies are currently underway on ICT applications for large haul transportation
(Daviesa et al., 2007) and integrating multi-modal traffic using ICT (Coronado
Mondragon, et al., 2009). Modern ICT is very much an evolving technology.
Consequently assets bought today are obsolete tomorrow. Obsolescence of hardware,

12. The roles of ICT in driverless, automated railway operations 501
compatibility with new software and operating systems and inter-operability among
products from different vendors are huge challenges for ATC.
In the next section, we report some major mishaps caused due to ICT failures.
8 Critical ICT failures
There have not been any major crises in automatic railway transportation because of ICT
failures. But in other sectors, ICT failures have caused some critical accidents. We briefly
list below a few major ICT failures.
1 The Air France Airbus A330 crash on 1 June 2009 is suspected to be the result of a
catastrophic failure of the aircraft’s flight control system – an ICT related system;
either a direct failure of the flight control system computers or failure to cope with
erroneous air speed sensor data.
2 The tail strike 10 of a United Arab Emirates Airbus A340 on 26 March 2009 whilst
taking off at Melbourne airport was a direct failure of ICT; the ICT system allowed
the manual entry of an aircraft weight parameter which was obviously inconsistent
for the particular flight journey.
3 On 7 October 2008 a Qantas 11 Airbus A330 on route from Singapore to Perth
whilst at 37 000 feet suffered an autopilot disconnection. That was accompanied by
various aircraft system failure indications. While the crew was evaluating the
situation, the aircraft abruptly pitched nose-down seriously injuring one flight
attendant and at least 13 passengers. Whilst the direct cause seems to be related to
the air speed sensor system, the ability of the flight control system to cater for such
erroneous signals is a severe limitation of the flight control ICT system.
4 On January 23, 2003, a Singapore Airlines (SIA 13) Boeing 747–400 experienced a
complete loss of information on all six integrated display units while in cruise flight
from Singapore to Sydney, Australia. The pilots flew the airplane for 45 minutes
using standby flight instruments, namely an altimeter, airspeed indicator, and
artificial horizon/attitude indicator, i.e., no traffic alert and collision avoidance
system, enhanced ground proximity warning system, or weather radar.
Investments, challenges and risks in automatic railway projects are tremendous.
However, in the last few decade huge investments are made all over the world in large
scale infrastructure projects, majorly in ATOs to alleviate city traffic congestion. This is
clear evidence that ICT is promising to offer long term returns to railway transportation
sector in terms of efficiency in spite of several challenges and risks involved in such large
scale projects.
9 Conclusions
Most of the recent infrastructural developments in the public sector are towards
transportation management, particularly in automatically operated railway services to
relieve city traffic congestion and bottlenecks. Private establishments have partnered in
such transportation projects and a majority of available literature is produced by private

13. 502 S. Narayanaswami and S. Mohan
vendors on product features and promotions. Academic articles available are
technological descriptions of one or more sub-systems. In this paper, we presented a
system-design, top-down description of automatic rail operations and in particular, roles
of ICT in such systems. There are major challenges in implementing a driverless
automated system, but advantages out of such a system are too many. Driverless
automated metro systems in the World endorse a safe and a profitable transportation
system. Owing to huge returns from these systems, several ICT vendors develop and
deploy systems of different sizes and capabilities. Huge development costs and short
asset life are deterrent to deployment of ICT-based solutions in railways. Hardware and
software products from different vendors are often not inter-operable which leads to high
expenses and obsolescence. With some actual specifications of real-life International
projects, we infer that scope for further capacity utilisation exists in current design and
implementation. However the number and size of metro projects in terms of investments
and turnover all over the world have phenomenally increased in recent times, as an
assertion that ICT is here to dominate logistics and transportation systems.
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Notes
1 CENELEC is the European Committee for Electrotechnical Standardization and is responsible
for standardisation in the electrotechnical engineering field. CENELEC creates market access
at European level but also at international level, adopting international standards wherever
possible, through its close collaboration with the International Electrotechnical Commission
(IEC). The Common standards used in Railway Signalling are EN50126 (Railway
Applications-RAMS), EN50128 (Software for Railway control and protection systems),
EN50129 (Safety related electronic systems for signalling) etc.