What is the TRain Effort?
The TRain Effort
is a proposal put forward for the
- formation, worldwide,
- of an Open, Free Consortium of
- railway people and institutions (companies, industries),
- of academics (ie., people, researchers, scientists),
and of research centres, within
- computer & computing science, and software engineering,
- transportation science & engineering,
- reliability and safety engineering, and
- operations research,
- on the subject of
- exploring,
- creating, ie., researching, and
- freely propagating (publishing, on the net, etc.),
- A Domain Theory for
the Railway Infrastructure.
Key Points:
Key points are:
- Research into the domain, not requirements,
not algorithms, not software,
- of "all things" railways (see below).
- Building up a public repository of railway system models.
Of course it is unavoidable that research into domains, result also
from research into and development of requirements and the design
of algorithms and software. Hence the TRain Effort will, obviously,
see research results, ie., reports, papers, etc., that contain
material on domains and requirements, or domains, requirements and
algorithms, or domains, requirements and software design.
TRain is more a group of people "gathered" around
- joint research,
- reports,
- workshops,
- conferences,
- a railway formalisations repository,
- a web-based TRain newsletter,
- and possibly a web journal,
than it is an
organisation.
The organisation, ie., the TRain Consortium, is needed as
a "mid-wife", to help secure and to help "magnify", a focused
collaboration.
The TRain Working
Groups are expected, in a sense,
- to be where "the real" work is being done (by its members)
- and co-ordinated (by its committee cum working group members).
It is through working groups that the TRain Effort will be
"kick-started".
The Basic Idea: The Overall Goals
The idea is that railways:
- that rail nets,
- their static (ie., topological) and
- dynamic (ie., signaling and switching ) properties,
- net development and maintenance, etc.,
- that rolling stock, its maintenance, deployment, etc.,
- that trains, their movement along the rails, that
is: Train traffic, etc.,
- that passenger ticketing, inquiries, ticket
cancellation, etc.,
- that freight handling: Reception, transfer,
tracing, delivery, etc.,
- that scheduling & allocation of
- timetables,
- rolling stock,
- staff,
- etc.,
- that net planning & development (construction),
- that entirely new forms of train service,
- etc.,
- that is, that all aspects of railways: Strategic,
tactical and operational management as well as operations
can all be both informally and formally fully adequately
described - but that such models need be developed individually,
and, formally, in rather different formal specification languages, and
harmonised (ie., "integration of formal methods"), as
well as communicated to all stake-holders.
The idea is to call for a "human
genome"-like, worldwide R&D, open
and free effort among university and railway
industry R&D centres to achieve the above.
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