Development of Railway Signaling System based on Network Technology

Much signaling equipment (e.g. signals, switching devices) are installed along railway tracks, and these are working in cooperation with each other, referring to other signaling equipment status. In today's railway signaling system, this information is transmitted using signal cables. Owing to this installation of signaling system itself, especially installation of signal cable, we have some problems on our conventional signaling system. The problems are 1st "high cost for construction", 2nd "many faults from mistakes in cable connection", and 3rd "much time for restoring when it has failed". To solve these problems we have developed a new signaling system based on network technology, utilizing Ethernet-passive optical network (E-PON). In this paper, we introduce this system, and define the requirements for securing safety, availability and environmental resistance of this system. Then we describe concrete techniques for realizing the requirements