Development of an Automated Test Environment for the Verification of CBTC On-Board System

Safety-critical system testing involves intensive effort; thus, Communications-Based Train Control (CBTC) on-board system verification requires massive endeavor if handled manually, resulting in increased labor cost and decreased test coverage. Therefore, test automation must be used to overcome the drawbacks of manual testing especially if the project timeline is inflexible. A test environment capable of automatically running predefined scenarios and creating test reports for CBTC on-board system testing is presented in this paper. Just like automated testing, manual testing can also be performed in the developed test environment to verify system design completely. In addition to basic test equipment (power supplies, oscilloscopes, adapters, network switches etc.) the test environment consists of multiple complex hardware and software blocks to simulate different on-board interfaces such as Balise Transmission Module (BTM), Train Control and Management System (TCMS), Wayside Automatic Train Protection (WSATP), Automatic Train Supervision (ATS), Driver Machine Interface (DMI), Train Interface Unit (TIU) and Speed Sensor Interface (SSI).