Formalization and Processing of Data Requirements for the Development of Next Generation Railway Traffic Management Systems

Railway Traffic Management Systems (TMSs) handle data from multiple railway subsystems, including Rail Business Services (such as interlocking, RBC, maintenance service, etc.) and external services (such as passenger information systems, weather forecast, etc.). In turn, the data from these subsystems are described in several models or ontologies contributed by various organizations or projects which are in a process of converging or federation. The challenge of the Shift2Rail OPTIMA project, which is implementing a communication platform for virtual testing of new applications for railway TMS, is to allow the exchange of data between different services or users and to support new traffic management applications, enabling access to a large number of disparate data sources. In this paper, the core activities of the OPTIMA project related to the formulation and standardization of a common data model are described. A new Common Data Model is developed based on standardized data structures to enable the seamless exchange of large amounts of data between different and heterogeneous sources and consumers of data, that contributes to the building of next generation of a more effective and efficient railway TMS suitable to offer precise and real-time traffic information to railway operators and other end users.