Model-based Design and Testing for Route Control of Railway Virtual Coupling

Virtual coupling is a next-generation signalling concept that separates trains by relative braking distances, allowing the follower to pursue the leader train safely and ensuring good transient dynamics. One of the main challenges in virtual coupling is trains coupling/decoupling at merging/diverging junctions. With the increased complexity of route protections and controls, conventional software developments methods for virtual coupling interlocking suffers from difficulties in safety guarantee, in which testing starts too late. To solve these problems, we propose an interlocking design approach for virtual coupling using model-based system engineering (MBSE) methods. The core logic of interlocking is designed with the UML conceptual models. In addition, a model-based test approach is investigated for automatically generating and optimizing test cases. The experimental results show the effectiveness and adequateness of the proposed MBSE-based interlocking development methods for virtual coupling.