A topology-based model for railway train control systems

An innovative topology-based method for modeling railway train control systems is proposed in this paper. The method addresses the problems of having to rely too much on designers' experience and of incurring excessive cost of validation and verification in the development of railway train control systems. Four topics are discussed in the paper: 1) the definition of basic topological units for modeling railway networks, based on the essential characteristics of these units; 2) the concept of a train movement authority topological space; 3) the interpretation of the train control logic as a topological space construct; and 4) topological space theorems for train control system verification. A case study is also presented, where the approach was applied in the simulation model of a typical railway network, and the results show good performance, which meets the system requirements. © 2000-2011 IEEE.