The railway sector was acting in a fragmented way and in silos corresponding most often to physical or functional subsystems or use cases, and the different owners/managers of the overall infrastructure at regional/national level, without global extensive view or full control of the global system involved by rail operations.
With the progress of digitization, analogue devices based on relays were progressively substituted by digital ones, and it is more and more evident that enabling the communication between already existing digital tools for various subsystems can be beneficial. What was missing was an efficient, automated and standardized way for these integrated and interplaying systems to act as one ecosystem: sharing, integrating, identifying, correlating and exploiting the right data at the right time.
In order to meet these challenges, in the continuity of LinX4Rail, the objective of LinX4Rail-2 was to develop and promote a common first prototype of Functional Rail System Architecture for the Rail sector, as requested by EC. This also involved the development of a Conceptual Data Model that, with the commitment of the Shift2Rail/Europe's Rail members, established the standard for the interactions between elements of the new architecture including possible links between legacy and new systems, thus ensuring sustainable interoperability between systems. In the course of the project, it was decided to set up the System Pillar within Europe's Rail Joint Undertaking which took over the official construction of the architecture. The role of LinX4Rail-2 was then agreed by the ERJU to support Task 1 of the System Pillar which deals with the general system architecture.
The ambition of LinX4Rail-2 was to achieve a comprehensive approach for the CDM, as a models’ federation, global system modelling specification and allowing implementation of technological breakthroughs. Both the “System of systems” architecture and the S2R-CDM should be open (easily extensible), and free for any usage.
The development of the “Systems of Systems” and S2R-CDM took advantage as much as possible of existing current initiatives such as Reference CCS Architecture (RCA), TAP/TAF approaches, OCORA, RTM, EULYNX, Ontorail in order to reach a single universally accepted “System of Systems” approach for the entire sector.
The objectives of LINX4RAIL-2 which have been reached are:
- The set up of a Common Rail Dictionary, in collaboration with current initiatives,
- The design of the S2R-CDM Modelling,
- The establishment of a proof of concept through 3 use cases,
- The set up of a strategy to ensure the implementation of technological breakthroughs (including RCA),
- To set up of a shared Common architecture vision.
