System architecture and Conceptual Data Model for railway, common data dictionary and global system modelling specifications

Project Information

LINX4RAIL

Grant agreement ID: 881826

DOI

10.3030/881826

Project closed

EC signature date 13 December 2019

Start date 1 December 2019

End date 30 November 2022

Funded under

• SOCIETAL CHALLENGES - Smart, Green And Integrated Transport

Total cost

No data

EU contribution

€ 2 155 092,16

Coordinated by

SNCF RESEAU
France

Periodic Reporting for period 3 - LINX4RAIL (System architecture and Conceptual Data Model for railway, common data dictionary and global system modelling specifications)

Reporting period: 2022-01-01 to 2022-11-30

Summary of the context and overall objectives of the project

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, the objective of LinX4Rail 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 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 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 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 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.

Work performed from the beginning of the project to the end of the period covered by the report and main results achieved so far

In order to rethink the rail system, to introduce a common vision and to build the first version of a rail Functional System Architecture, until the end of the project, the LinX4Rail’s achievements are:
- The project delivered the “Identification of Common Business Objectives for the existing and future Railway System”, which shows the specific objectives of the stakeholders, helping to understand better their business drivers. This CBO has been considered by the System Pillar ramp up project,
- The set-up of the final version of the OntoRail Dictionary with its functional specifications, its first set of results,
- The data extraction and regular updates of source models (Eulynx, RSM, ERA RINF, IFC Rail, X2R4, Transmodel),
- The definition of a set of indicators to quantify the quality, usability and suitability of the CDM solution designed and applied to the identified use cases. Description of use cases that should make use CDM,
- The elaboration of the Conceptual Data Model,
- The demonstration of the relevance of the usage of the CDM, based on a federation of existing models, through its usage to fulfil the needs of different use-cases. See deliverable D4.2 “Demonstrator Execution Results”,
- The release of the System Functional Architecture,
- The elaboration of the final report on CDM governance and deployment strategy which focus rather on the CDM governance as the functional architecture governance was taken over by System Pillar.
To achieve these results LinX4Rail has carried out a series of dedicated workshops with all rail-relevant stakeholders (project’s partners together with external initiatives and experts). Several dissemination actions have also beenset up, such as CDM webinars, presentation of LinX4Rail outcomes during the WCRR, TRA, SmartRaCon and InnoTrans events.
Through the year 2022 LinX4Rail worked with the System PiLlar stakeholders in order to align their activities, in particular relevant to Task 1, relevant both in the ramp-up and during the 1st running period.
The LINX4RAIL’s advisory board met for the 3rd time the 22nd of June 2022 and provided useful guidance on the production, in terms of relevance of the approach and scientific coherence, of architecture and system modelling, and on how the results could be applied by railway organizations not involved in the project.
In the meantime, during all the remaining duration of the LinX4Rail project, regular exchanges of results with the System Pillar stakeholders were carried out.

Progress beyond the state of the art and expected potential impact (including the socio-economic impact and the wider societal implications of the project so far)

No global approach for a global Railway System Architecture had been undertaken so far. Existing initiatives in the railway sector were mainly relevant to subsystems of somehow limited scope, with no collaboratively formalized agreed sector business objectives existing so far.

A synthesis and lessons learned from other sectors initiatives enabled the main option agreed for the Architecture (three-layer structure, see below). The project set up common basic principles and structure for the sector Railway System Architecture and had wide exchanges with rail sectors, on architectures initiatives and how they affect existing Shift2Rail projects.

As we started from a situation without any system architecture, a dedicated task supports the definition of principles towards the definition of the governance of the system architecture at the European level.
LinX4Rail produced in December 2021 the first release of the System Functional Architecture.

For the CDM workstream, a functional specification of the appropriate ontology was produced from a review of the existing ontology approaches. Based on the Railway Ontology developed in the project, the representations in these currently existing models were put into a coherent framework. From this approach, the target CDM vision was developed. Having in view shorter term implementation in Shift2Rail projects, the concept of a short-term version of the CDM was developed. The chosen approach give the possibility for CDM users to extend the model to fulfil their use cases if the required entities are not included in the short term CDM. The CDM is then open and adaptable by design to contributions of actors of the railway sector, inside or outside Shift2Rail.

In conclusion, LinX4Rail paved the way for the System Pillar, supported and accompanied its work in particular in the ramp-up and the operational phase within its scope that is the general system architecture. Furthermore, the documents produced by LinX4Rail, in particular related to the CBO and the architecture versions, were used by the System Pillar.

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