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Blockchain & Railway Signaling
By Kapil Rajyaguru
As of now, signaling in Indian Railway is carried out by centralized systems which give instructions to train operator.
The biggest challenges with such method include system failure, loss of communication, data security, human error, driver’s death, or ad-hoc traffic diversion needs.
In consideration to these inevitable factors, railway frameworks need to have safety frameworks to prevent collisions and derailments. But such dispatching and safety frameworks come with their own demerits such as complexity, huge cost, manpower overheads, and heterogeneous nature and interoperability issues. But also this can be controlled by the adoption of blockchain technology which can all at once handle for ad-hoc traffic, deviations, construction-caused alterations, equipment failures etc. by converting it to a modular “Transportation Operating System”.
This decentralized system shall make it possible for the trains and track elements to work as first-level active participants and carry out several actions such as route locking, setting a changing point position, communicating with other trains, automatic speed control and braking, GPS drove Train localization.
All these actions shall be network-driven and ensure compliance with the standard working rules. The reliability of which shall be derived from the matching of physical reality (trackside equipment) and the IT counterpart (Digital twin). This would enable the detection of trackside malfunctions and the prevention of accidents.
Going by the cardinal principles of Railway Signaling which give utmost priority to the safety of human life, the validation of every decision on the go shall be done by strong authorities as multiple parties such as station masters. Or even a better alternative will be to involve the signaling rules and control procedures in the smart contract, a copy of which shall be carried by each train to be followed while making their own route-based decisions.
In this case, a Blockchain API shall be superimposed over such Rail network enabling all the trains with conflicting movements for a particular route to act as the ‘active nodes’ dynamically and make a ‘consensus-based-decision.’
However, there are several challenges like interoperability between different blockchain.
There are several variants on the basic theme, with different design choices made at various points. Also, even if the Blockchain technology used is identical, two different Railway deployments may not be able to talk to each other.
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