Today, a company can’t be successful by trying to cover all bases. Successful companies are those that concentrate on their core competencies and increase the customer benefits of their offers through complementary services from other companies. This effect, and the enhanced customer value, is shown by the successful cooperation of three technology companies, each of which is among the leading suppliers in its market. The Swedish truck and bus producer Scania, the Finnish vehicle PC manufacturer Sunit Oy, and Kontron AG, the market leader for embedded computer technology, have together developed one of the highest-performing on-board computers that currently exist for the market.

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In 1999, there was CJSC “Moscow Monorail” established and the program “Moscow Monorail Transport” approved which is aimed at developing a monorail transport system in Moscow, with the participation of the Government of Moscow and Federal State Unitary Enterprise “Moscow Institute for Heat Engineering”.
Moscow Monorail Transport System (MMTS) – is not just a new type of the rolling-stock, but it’s a new spin in the field of automation control of complex transport systems. In the framework of the project RTSoft company developed and implemented dispatch control system (DCS) at the first length of the railroad between the stations “Sergei Eizenschtein Street” and “Timiryazevskaya Metro Station”. Moscow monorail is a sophisticated technical complex which is composed of a line with 12 passenger stations, electro rolling-stock (ERS), a train shed with a transborder (a mechanism for leading trains out to the line), railroad substations, automated track switches, railroad safety devices, communication systems and many others. Dispatch control system is used to control such a sophisticated complex.

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JSC Russian Railways is a large-scale rail transport company for both cargo and passenger trains. The Russian Federation founded the JSC Russian Railways Company and they widely use Kontron's CPCI products (i.e. CP605, CP690, CP-ASM10-PSB) for their automatic switching systems. With this technology they have the ability to reduce many delays associated with traditional switching.

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The AGC (Autorail Grande Capacité) from Bombardier is part of the latest generation of regional trains for local and long-distance travel. Kontron developed the hardware of the Train Management System (TMS), the Graphical User Interface (GUI) and the Remote I/Os of the AGC.

The conductor and maintenance personnel use the GUI to access the TMS in real time. The TMS acts as the central system of the train and is also a gateway in between several networks like WTB, MVB, LON, CAN, Ethernet and wireless connections offering remote connections. The goal is to have a fast and transparent data transfer of the train’s core functions and to manage the passenger oriented comfort systems. The Remote I/Os are developed by Kontron to offer an optimized economic solution for I/O’s decentralized management on a network like MVB-, or Ethernet.

The EN50155 standard for electronic railroad applications places heavy demands on the Kontron hardware. The standard assumes that electronic systems on trains will need to operate 24 hours a day for 30 years, or approximately 250,000 hours, without failure. This means that train management systems must be designed to withstand the toughest environmental conditions: extended temperature ranges (-40°C to +85°C), humidity, vibrations and power fluctuations. Even heat build-up and therefore energy absorption have to stay within narrow ranges: only passive cooling technologies are permitted.

Picture of a train management system
 

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Qinghai-Tibet Railway is the highest altitude and most long-distance railway in altiplano of the world. 960 km of the Qinghai-Tibet railway located 4,000 meters above the sea level and the highest point at 5,072 meters. The project is dubbed an "engineering marvel" because there were and are many technical difficulties for such a railway which was built on the permafrost for such a high altitude. On the second section from Golmud to Lhasa, 1142 km completely, include 45 train station and 38 are unstaffed. To meet the system requirements, a Intelligent Autonomous Decentralized Systems (IADS) technologies was applied to such a low-density line for first time in China.  Some key technologies adopted in the system like signaling system were provided from Kontron. Based on CompactPCI system, most valued reliability, flexibility and long-term availability were delivered to the whole management system.

Siemens Transportation Systems (STS) relies on Kontron Transportation high-end technology to design new, successful products. Kontron 6U CompactPCI, 19 inches/84TE meets highest constraining railway requirements and norms. This system is composed of 2 calculators networked with a permanent Ethernet connection installed in the underground driving cab.

It allows following functionalities:

• Automatic piloting of the underground thanks to a real time industrial PC with Pentium MMX 166 processor working under VxWorks operating system
• Multimedia functions including audio announcements, passenger carriages video surveillance and a maintenance assistance device (Multimedia PC assembled around an ETX–PIIIM 650 module working under WinXPE operating system with JAVA applications)

Permanently connected to the centralized driving cab, this system guarantees to its owners a perfect reactivity and a real time management of all vehicles.

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Kontron has realized a CompactPCI based train control system for the French railways. There are approximately 200 control units and 2000 field units on the track connected by Ethernet. Such mission critical systems require 100 percent reliability. Therefore the fail-over control units are designed with two different hardware and software technologies for redundancy: An x86 based part with the a 3U Intel^® Pentium M CPCI board, the CP306, running under Linux RT-OS and a PowerPC 8540 based part with LynxOS. If any failure occurs in one system, regardless if software or hardware, the redundant system takes over. The outdoor units placed on the rails are equipped with the E^²Brain Computer-on-Module, due to features like extended temperature range, resistant to harsh environment conditions, and high reliability.

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Kontron produces ultra low power-dissipating 6U VME Single Board Computers (SBCs) for the driverless automated trains that connect air terminals in many airports around the world. Kontron embedded computers contribute to the reliability of the driverless train shuttle at the airports of London Heathrow, Beijing, Singapore, Dallas Fort Worth, Madrid and Miami. Dissipating less than 7 Watts, this SBC, the VCE405 can be used in fan-less natural convection environments. For automated train applications, the commercially available VCE405 has been enhanced with an application dedicated features, including a front panel display and a 'VITAL' processor reliability feature. Kontron's design team has integrated these enhancement features into the COTS product as a manufacturing build option for the full benefit of the customer. This COTS-Modified, custom COTS product marries the low cost advantage of COTS products with the advantages of COTS products shipped in volume, namely short lead time, low recurrent costs, best manufacturing quality and permanent obsolescence monitoring, providing the perfect fit to the application needs through the tailorization of the product.

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To offer a maximum of comfort to the passengers during intercity travels, tilting technology is more & more implemented in the new generations of trains. This equipment is based on 2 parallel independents computer networks for 100 percent safety of different technologies (first system: VME based on 68k with VRTX32; second system: VME based on x86 with QNX) to minimize common mode risks. Helped by a very large portfolio of Kontron COTS products Kontron realized successfully this equipment by a judicious choice of reliable & stable standards like Vrtx32, QNX and VME for the system bus.

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Voyager, Bombardier Tilting train for Virgin, United Kingdom.
(Photo copyright of Bombardier).

Within the framework of a Transportation project, Kontron has developed an Intelligent Display Unit (IDU) for the surveillance of passenger doors on the train. The display is also used to show train diagnostics and configuration. This unit is based on an industrial PC architecture (Pentium M) working with standard operating systems like XP Embedded and Linux. The PC104/104+ extension bus also allows adding various railway-specific busses like MVB communication or video surveillance with image incrustation. The strong points of this system are low consumption, resistance to industrial temperature ranges from -25°C to +70°C, excellent shock and vibration resistance, and ability to work under 24V, 72V or 110V.

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Large shipwrecks like those of the „Jan Heweliucz“ and the „Estonia“ in the mid-1990s led to the realization that flight recorders mandatory in aviation should also be, in similar forms, used in shipping. According to the regulations of the International Maritime Organization (IMO Resolution A.861), a UN organization for maritime safety, these ‘Voyage Data Recorders’ must be used on all RoRo (roll-on/roll off) passenger ships beginning July 1, 2002. In similar terms, they are also stringently required for all new vessels of 3,000 GRT or more. However, old “barges” without passenger traffic presently are not yet required to have them installed.

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An experimental Moscow monorail transportation system, which is currently deployed in Moscow, represents a modern high-technology urban means of transportation, to develop which the latest achievements of science and technology not only in the field of means of transportation themselves (new kinds of rolling stock, traction engines etc.) but also in the field of automated control of complex transportation systems were used.

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The planning and development of the entire control system for the subway and suburban railway network in Warsaw was carried out by the Faculty of Transport at the Warsaw University of Technology in co-operation with Kontron. The world-renowned ‘Remote Control and Supervisory System’ was first installed in 1994. The subway system has expanded rapidly and so too has the control technology. A distinctive technical achievement for rail transport safety is the computer

interlocking system, which complies with SIL-4, the highest railway safety standard. This guarantees the correct interaction of more than 3,000 real-time I/Os. The hardware configuration will be available for years on end and offers an extremely high MTBF.

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