Keywords: safety of level crossings, ERTMS/ETCS, GSM-R, railway command control.

The study discussed in the present paper seeks to develop a new LC control/command architecture in the ERTMS L2/3 operation context, which allows for preventing some identified risky scenarios. The main motivation that underlines the developed control scheme is to make a step change on the LC control operation, by switching from a rudimentary passive control to a new paradigm that advocates for a supervised control-command which takes in consideration the dynamics within the LC zone as a whole. In addition to its advantages in terms of safety, the established architecture scheme seeks for dispensing with train sensing devices, thus making getting maintenance saving possible, as well as improving the system’s reliability. We should also notice that this is perfectly in line with the increasing willingness to minimize track equipment and, hence, to ensure substantial savings in terms of installation and maintenance. In order to establish the LC control architecture, we have set up a formal framework which enables expressing the various constraints to be ensured, and we have illustrated how formal models and analytic techniques can be advantageously utilized for designing and validating control architectures for safety critical railway systems. Besides, the important debugging phase witnesses how developing such a control model can hide some fine features which are intractable without the support of automated checking tools. It is interesting to recall here that using such formal techniques is more and more recommended for the design, the verification and the validation of critical complex systems, particularly in railways. Although further setups still need to be undertaken before an actual implementation, the discussed contribution paves the way towards developing a control architecture which efficiently integrates LCs in the ERTMS/ETCS operation framework.

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