The Application of Automation Theory to Railway Signaling Systems: Turkish National Railway Signaling Project

When compared with the other transportation systems, railway systems are economical, safer and more environment friendly. Despite all these features, investments on railways in Turkey remained quite restricted in comparison to other European countries. The initial construction costs of railways are high and developing its signaling system also requires a lot of attention. Signaling system is the vital part of a railway system which ensures safe travel and transportation on railways. One of the main reasons that make a signaling system critical and hard to develop is to satisfy the recommendations of related functional safety standards such as EN 50128 and EN 61508-3. In this study, functional safety requirements used in railway signaling systems are stated and the use of recommended methods in the Turkish National Railway Signaling Project (TNRSP) are explained. Especially, the software development process and the use of several programming techniques in determination of the software architectures are discussed.