Operational Rules for the Digital Railway

摘要

Operational rules are a key element for safe and efficient railway operations. Today, due to the requirement to cover all generations of legacy signalling systems, the rulebooks have reached a very high degree of complexity. Also, the operational rules differ extremely between national railways. The coming roll-out of a new digital signalling infrastructure replacing all the old systems offers the unique opportunity to establish a new rulebook for the digital railway that is no longer caught in the path of the legacy systems. This article presents a concept for such a rule-book and discusses how traditional operational terms could be handled in the new system. Since there is today practically no academic research on the design of operational rules, it intents also to provide a basis for further research.