A tradition of safety —
Standards, dependability and isolation —
Architectures —
Key RTOS characteristics —
Conclusion
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A tradition of safety
Trains are the oldest truly mechanized method of transport. The first mode of transportation that did not rely on muscle power or the weather, trains revolutionized the way we live and do business. Today, two centuries after the first locomotives began ...
Standards, dependability and isolation
Considering the railway industry’s long history of developing safe systems, it isn’t surprising that two decades ago the CENELEC (Comité Européen de Normalisation Électrotechnique) developed the railway applications standards ...
Architectures
Where dependability is essential, as in any safety-related system, the OS should be an OS designed to support guarantees of availability and reliability. These OSs are usually called real-time OSs (RTOS). RTOSs differ first of all in their architectures ...
Key RTOS characteristics
A microkernel architecture is only one of many design characteristics contributing to RTOS dependability. Other key characteristics include the ability to meet realtime commitments by pre-empting lower priority kernel calls, prevent unpredictable ...
Conclusion
Train control systems are safety-related systems. They must meet the strict dependability requirements set out in IEC 61508 and the EN 5012x group of standards. This article focuses, therefore, on some of the OS characteristics that ...
