Operational and technical testing of the European Train Control System (ETCS)

Kurzfassung

The European train control system (ETCS) is one of the core parts of the European rail traffic management system (ERTMS) [1]. It has been specified by a European team in the last years [2]. The specification is published by the European Railway Agency (ERA). Different industry suppliers developed products according to this specification. Now those products have to be tested according to the testing requirements. Technical tests are used to prove that the product fulfil the technical requirements of the specification. They are called the conformity tests. Operational tests are used to show that the system fulfils the operational requirements of the railway operator. The idea presented here aims to show, that technical tests as well as operational tests can be defined according to a common standard. The main advantage of this approach is to perform the tests in the same lab environment. The system under test should be integrated in the Lab only once. Both kinds of tests can be executed without any modification of the lab integration. This leads on the one hand to a significant reduction of integration effort in the lab and on the other hand to a reduction of redundancy in the tests itself. This second increase in efficiency needs a methodical basis for the definition of the tests to be executed. This methodical base supports the optimization of the tests. Practically seen the approach allows identifying which parts of the requirements are already tested in the technical tests. In the next step the operational tests are designed by using test cases from the technical tests and adding the missing operational test cases. Finally the operational tests can be designed by focussing on the requirements which not tested yet. The full contribution shows the method of designing tests and the suitable test environment. As a perspective an approach for the generation of field test templates from the operational lab tests is given. The approach used for the conformity tests for ETCS can be extended for operational and safety lab tests as well as for operational field tests. The method of the generation of the test sequences can be used for the different types of tests. The optimization criteria as well as the rules for the parameterization differ for the different kinds of tests. If the same approach for the formalisation and parameterization is used, the lab environment can be used for any type of test.