Reliability on two rails

Bombardier Transportation has its global
headquarters in Berlin. It has an installed base of more than 100,000 vehicles
worldwide. Bombardier is recognized as a leader in the global rail sector. The
parent company, Bombardier Inc. headquartered in Canada, is a global
corporation making transportation solutions such as commercial aircraft,
business jets, and rail transportation equipment, systems, and services.
Several years ago I completed VMEbus courses at Bombardier locations in Sweden
and Germany. The company had already been using VMEbus in many projects.

Kontron and Bombardier have had an ongoing
relationship since 1996. Kontron provides engineering, development,
certification and manufacture of real-time embedded systems meeting stringent
customer and government authority requirements. Meanwhile, Bombardier train
systems use such technology on many transportation and rail control systems in
Dallas, London, Madrid, Miami, Singapore, and Taipei.

This technology is also integrated into one of
Bombardier’s rail systems made for China’s Capital Airports Holding Company
(CAH), which holds assets of 67 billion yuan (U.S. $8.3 billion). CAH is
China’s largest airport company, controlling 16 Chinese airports including
Beijing’s international airport and having a total passenger-handling capacity of
82 million. The CAH project is a people mover serving small areas, such as
airports or theme parks (Figure 1). The trains are equipped with two sets of
computing systems for redundant operation and for parallel calculations
requiring large amounts of communication. They must meet the performance and
cost constraints of transportation companies such as CAH.

Kontron first provided the Intelligent Serial I/O
(ISO) VME card, customized to meet Bombardier’s specific needs, and the CPU440
and CPU540 VME processor cards were also integrated for onboard control and
positive train separation in Bombardier’s automated train applications. Figure
2 shows the typical command center of a CFD train (photo courtesy of Ian Boyle,
UK).

Then Bombardier commissioned the development of the
customized CPU541 VME card, integrating dual processors to manage critical
safety. The VCE405 processor card was optimized for Bombardier to replace the
CPU541. The VCE405 is a 6U VME conduction-cooled SBC. The ultra-low power
consumption of the IBM PowerPC 405GP/GPr and the ALMA2e PCI-to-VME bridge,
developed by Thales Computers (now part of Kontron), make the VCE405 a highly
suitable choice for critical environments.

Other rail applications

Chemins de Fer Departmenteaux (CFD) in France has
decided to equip their new generation of trains with a fully electronic command
control instead of relays or industrial PLCs. This electronic equipment
includes the Train Management System (TMS), the Human Machine Interface (HMI),
and remote I/O. It allows the realization of a passenger information system,
tightly coupled with a local system of a specific region. This system is based
on open standards such as VME for the hardware and ISaGRAF (IEC61131-3 open to
C language) for the software tools.

The very complex task to brake a moving train in a
controlled manner on a long, multiple-car train with different loads without
skidding, brake locking, or derailing requires reliable, precise control in
real time from VMEbus systems.

Railway fair

Innotrans, held in even years in Berlin, Germany,
is the world’s largest railway fair. This year (Sept. 23-28), more than 88,000
experts (30 percent more than in 2006) from 100 countries visited on the first
four days, and an additional 25,000 came on the weekend (Sept. 27-28) when the
fair was open to the general public. More than half of the 1,900 exhibitors
came from 41 foreign countries to a 50 percent larger exhibition area.
Contracts worth over € 2 billion (U.S. $2.7 billion) were signed or already
delivered directly at the fair.

For more information, e-mail Hermann at [email protected].