Adding Technological Solutions for Safety Improvement at Level Crossings: A Functional Specification

Abstract

The work discussed in the present paper is part of the PANsafer project, whose purpose is to improve safety at level crossings. This project integrates several academic and industrial partners working together on several tasks. Here are described early tasks of the project, aiming at exploring, analyzing and justifying adequate solutions to improve safety at level crossings. The selected solutions will be implemented and evaluated in the framework of the subsequent work-packages of the project.First, a fine statistical analysis is carried out using accident/incident databases. At the same time, a human behaviour study is led in order to determine potential risky behaviours. Then, all the actors involved in the level crossing area are inventoried and a list of the services expected by these actors is established in order to bring out the main functions of the level crossing protection system.The state of the art shows that several solutions, both organizational and technical, are potentially useful to improve safety at level crossings. Moreover, the early studies carried out within PANsafer have listed some potential evolutions, concerning functionalities, law enforcement and normalization. The idea is to dispatch the results of the statistical analysis and its interpretation in the functional scheme of the level crossing environment. In this way, all the weak points within the level crossing environment will be mapped into the functional model in order to underline the functions which have to be enhanced. Therefore, a list of the retained solutions to be implemented is established.Finally, these solutions are specified using UML diagrams to explicit the scenarios that could happen at level crossings. First, we give a static description of the system (use case diagrams); Then? we establish a dynamic description (activity diagrams). Our ultimate goal is to give a detailed specification of the solutions which are going to be implemented and validated.