Wayside – CTC Communication Service

Highlights

For more than 10 years, PSA has supported the wayside controllers of our client, a global rail technology company. By request, we modify and refine controllers to comply with advancing standards, and provide trouble-free communication and appropriate response time. This time, we were asked to find an optimal way of communicating with the dispatch unit to establish correct operations of the Centralized Traffic Control (CTC) system.

Challenge

Client Challenge

Empower operation and control for wayside devices by excluding communication failures.

Project Objective

Increase the quality of communication between the Wayside Controllers and the Office Gateway of the Centralized Traffic Control (CTC) system.

Solution

To provide robust communication between the Wayside Controller and the Centralized Traffic Control system, the PSA engineering team created a messaging service operating on the ZedBoard platform. To validate the operability of the solution, we created a PC-based test tool.

High communication quality is ensured through the following features:

Data transfer over EMP (Edge Messaging Protocol) to speed up operations
Data transfer over Class D to improve reliability
Simulation of specific data of the wayside controller to recreate field operation environment

For Class D implementation, we converted the Class D protocol into a standalone library, which allowed these links to be used by any client service.

Additionally, we updated the previous version of this service operating on the ViPro platform. Our team provided correct delivery of status, control commands, and events data and simulated wayside data to execute testing. When updating the ViPro Web interface, we added CTC configuration and status pages, which allowed for tracking the following parameters:

Link status
Wayside device control status
Link statistics web pages

As a result, the client gained a prototype demonstrating the high reliability of the delivered Wayside – CTC communication solution. The service has passed the required tests and is ready to be implemented in the field.

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