ETCS Gotthard Base Tunnel, Tender Train Control and Signalling System

The Danish rail infrastructure manager BDK is carrying out a full replacement of all signalling equipment, control and Business IT systems. Two contracts involving control systems have been awarded, one to Thales for Centralised Traffic Control (CTC) West and Passenger Information and one to Alstom for CTC East, Advanced Traffic Management and Decision Support and Planning functions. Emch+Berger AG Bern played the leading role in the RAEP consortium supporting BDK in ensuring this portion of the East (Alstom) contract satisfies the expectations of BDK. The specific challenges included:

• Visioning, Blueprinting and Specifying a completely new approach to Traffic Management and Decision Support for a large Network with mixed traffic
• Aligning the existing Product Base of the Supplier and Instructing the Processes
• Developing Real Time Database Systems that cover Rolling Stock, State of the Railway, Topology
• Integration of Disruption Management including Maintenance Contract Requirements into the Design
• The support of the Customer in preparing the business changes to make best use of the emerging Technology

In ETCS projects the test and commissioning activities must ensure the timely completion of all tests required by system and subsystem requirements, safety and interoperability norms, operational scenarios, customer internal, national and international norms, etc. and must also assure the preparation and execution of commissioning activities.

Emch+Berger AG Bern provides highly skilled specialist for the Gotthard and Ceneri base tunnels and the Danish Fjernbane project, who consult the customer (and suppliers) in different test and commissioning topics, and specify and supervise all necessary test and commissioning activities.

Emch+Berger has done this successfully in the past in the Lötschberg base tunnel.

Assistance of detailed design, realisation and commissioning of the new train control and signalling system for the Gotthard base tunnel on behalf of AlpTransit Gotthard AG.

The project is carried out by a consortium under the lead of Emch+Berger AG Bern. The works includes all signalling related systems on an ERTMS-basis in the perimeter of the project such as control and communication system, interlocking, ETCS/RBC and is embedded over special interfaces into other neighbouring signalling systems (conventional signalling systems).

The Traffic Management is the railway-operation’s central element to assure the expected improvement in operational performance put forward to justify the investments into the Signalling Programme, the implementation of ETCS level 2 on the entire network of Denmark. With regards to the duplication of traffic in the future, latest science operational processes are applied to traffic management by centralised traffic control centres.

The objective of operational performance is satisfying the expectations of present and future rail customers. The institutional relationship between the infrastructure operator and the train operating companies is designed based on responsibilities to align processes to achieve this. The improvement in the effectiveness of the Traffic Management is based on the introduction of a control loop model of traffic management incorporating also conflict-prediction and real-time rescheduling processes (conflict resolution).