Cloud Networks for ERTMS Railways Systems (Short Paper)

European Rail Traffic Management System(ERTMS) efficiently manages and schedules the trainsguaranteeing passengers safety and service constraints andmaximizing railways capacity. The management system isresponsible of the elaboration needed to control the trainscirculation and to derive the necessary commands for trainsand trackside actuators such as railroad switches. Theseoperations need heavy computational resources and require anexchange of information between trains, trackside equipmentsand elaboration components. Currently the managementsystem is hosted in the Central Control Rooms that centrallymanage and supervise trains traffic of different geographicalareas. This paper proposes a new paradigm about the executionof the ERTMS management activities taking advantage fromcloud networks. It suggests to distribute among cloud resourcesthe computational load due to the elaboration of the collecteddata and the derivation of required commands for trains andactuators. This can make possible a proactive approach tothe trains management, suitable not only to consider the datasent by the trackside equipments, but also the informationdirectly collected onboard of the train. Despite trackside dataare considered by the management system, actually they arenot integrated with onboard real-Time data that are sent tothe ground system for diagnosis purposes. These two sourcesof information can be jointly used to simulate in advance thetrain transit, deduce possible delays and anomalies and moreefficiently manage the trains circulation.