SIGNALLING & TELECOMS
One of the first SIL4 COTS fail-safe systems for rail
Shlomo Pri-Tal, vice-president for ControlSafe Platforms at Artesyn Embedded Technologies, discusses the company’s presence at InnoTrans 2014.
W
ith a worldwide launch at InnoTrans 2014, the new ControlSafe platform from
Artesyn Embedded Technologies is one of the first to use commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) components to create a SIL4 certified fail-safe computing platform that can be used in a wide range of rail control and signalling applications.
Based on open standards, Artesyn’s ControlSafe platform is a cost-effective solution that enables rail application developers and system integrators to accelerate time-to-market without being deterred by the potentially high costs and risks associated with the stringent SIL4 system development and certification process.
Artesyn’s ControlSafe Platform meets all the functional safety, reliability and availability requirements mandated by rail standards and specifications, including safety-related software certified to EN50128 SIL4, reliability, availability,
maintainability and safety
(RAMS) processes certified to EN50126, and hardware certified to EN50129 SIL4. This makes Artesyn’s ControlSafe Platform ideal for deployment in safety application environments to protect investment in rail infrastructure.
Delivering a fail-safe computing system
Leveraging over 30 years of expertise in developing highly reliable and available embedded computer systems, Artesyn is providing rail industry customers with an unmatched, highly reliable platform with 15 years of planned product life and 25 years of extended support and service.
Artesyn’s ControlSafe Platform is designed to deliver best-in-class system availability as
94 | rail technology magazine Aug/Sep 14
high as six nines (99.9999%), which means that system downtime is limited to just a few seconds per year.
Adhering to Artesyn’s future-proof development philosophy, the ControlSafe Platform is modular, scalable and designed to seamlessly accommodate additional I/O interfaces as well as upgraded processors that will be required throughout the product life cycle.
The ControlSafe Platform’s data lock-step architecture, which supports high performance modern processors, makes it possible to upgrade processors over time while retaining the same I/O.
The ControlSafe Platform consists of two redundant ControlSafe Computers (CSCs), each of which delivers fail-safe operations.
They are linked by a Safety Relay Box (SRB) that monitors and controls the two CSCs. At the core of each CSC are two identical CPU boards that run in data lock-step mode and implement a two-out-of-two (2oo2) voting mechanism.
A health-and-safety architecture is designed so that there is no possibility of an incorrect output being driven to external equipment.
Allowing customers to focus development on system differentiation
Artesyn provides a platform that is high performance, easy to use, scalable and upgradeable. Application processing is carried out on a modern Freescale QorIQ processor, delivering high performance, energy-efficient processing and supporting the extended life
required by rail equipment.
Having implemented the 2oo2 voting facilities in hardware allows application developers to migrate existing application software with minimal modifications. An extensive set of well-documented application programming interfaces (APIs) that provide access to system parameters and management facilities make it easy for application developers and system integrators to monitor and control the system.
The Artesyn ControlSafe Platform includes I/O modules that provide interface to a range of communication protocols such as CAN, Ethernet, Ethernet Ring, UART, and MVB. All I/O modules have a common architecture based on the same Freescale CPU core and the same Wind River VxWorks 653 operating system, thus simplifying the software development environment. All I/O modules are accessed over Ethernet allowing a seamless distributed architecture where additional expansion can be contained in a remote chassis. All modules support remote on-line software and firmware upgrade without the risk of rendering a system inoperable.
Artesyn is focused on continued platform development to build a comprehensive product line. A new initiative is the development of a discrete I/O expansion box which will enable customers to seamlessly integrate the ControlSafe Platform in a variety of rail signaling applications. Artesyn’s ultimate goal is to enhance customers’ competitive position by allowing them to focus their development efforts on differentiating end applications.
W:
www.artesyn.com FOR MORE INFORMATION
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