Digirail’s working group for infrastructure information handles and resolves issues related to infrastructure information. There are currently several entities in process, including matters regarding ATO and ETCS. How are infrastructure information issues dealt with in practice? How has the work been progressing so far? Into what kind of subsets has the infrastructure information been divided?
An infrastructure information working group has started its work at Digirail, and the group’s objective is to address and resolve issues that deal with infrastructure information. The group met for the first time in March. Among the participants are experts from Fintraffic and the Finnish Transport Infrastructure Agency, and the ATO project (automatic train operation) has also added an expert from HSL to the group.
“Our goal is to find out where, how and by whom infrastructure information is to be managed in the future. The work has had a good start, as everyone in the working group shares the view that there is a lot to do in this area and that timely, reliable and easily integrated infrastructure information is important for success,” says Maija Kärki who leads the group.
In practice, the group identifies and documents business needs for the development of infrastructure information, considers and escalates risks around infrastructure information, and collects and examines key quality requirements. Feedback and observations are collected on the basis of the results. The group prepares decisions for processing by Digirail panels and communicates changes and developments to stakeholders.
The infrastructure information is processed in subsets
As the main entities, the working group will address, among other things, what type of infrastructure information the control command and signalling system, external controllers and other external equipment require, how to ensure that ATO receives the necessary infrastructure information at the necessary level of accuracy, and how the future TMS development will obtain the necessary infrastructure information in order to succeed.
“Currently, both ETCS (European Train Control System) and ATO need infrastructure information for their information systems, but it is not yet clear to us what requirements suppliers and security objectives impose on infrastructure information and their creation and maintenance processes,” says Kärki.
Another major entity is also the enterprise architecture. It aims to break the infrastructure information into subsets that are easier to process. The present state and desired state is then defined for the subsets as well as the means for reaching the target. To date, the enterprise architecture is divided into 12 different entities, i.e. so-called main information groups: track, track network, geometry, area data, fixed work areas, speed limit ranges, monitoring equipment, safety equipment, railway yard services, electrification, signs and markings, and more.
“The infrastructure information as a whole is so extensive that we need to be able to handle it in parts. The main information groups make it easier for us, for example, to determine the information to which the security objectives relate, the information that future development work requires and the infrastructure information that we can currently say is functioning sufficiently well, so that we do not need to think about it right now.”