doi:10.3850/978-981-08-6396-8_P071

ABSTRACT

The demand for urban and suburban transport is changing very rapidly in response to the sustainable development stakes of big cities and urban agglomerations. In this context, public transport authorities are asking for bigger and better transportation capacities and a higher level of performance. The goal is to achieve high level of performance that must be accompanied by a high level of safety and maximum comfort for the passengers. This paper identifies the improvements of the URBALIS signalling system from Alstom Transport. First, the requirements were established based on a thorough analysis of the performance needs of urban transport systems. Since the performance needs are quite significant, two steps were needed to control the performance level and to guarantee the performance that was achievable and observable on site in commercial operation: process management and follow-up of performance. This paper also reports the performance of the simulator X-DrivE that has been developed 1) to support the performance management, 2) to execute the performance follow-up process and 3) to validate all the improvements of the URBALIS automatic train operation system. The performances achieved with the simulator on site conformed to the studies carried out in the factory with different configurations such as: train, metro and trams, steel-wheeled or rubber-tyred, linear induction motors, ground power supply, steep slopes. We have observed that the time taken to fine-tune the URBALIS automatic train operation system has been reduced by a factor of three with the engagement of X-DrivE. Furthermore, this paper discusses how the works in the factory and the use of endurance tests (robustness) have contributed to the time efficiency as well as of system fine-tuning. In this paper, Alstom Transport has shown how different steps as well as the X-DrivE simulator have allowed us to concentrate our efforts on the great project of the future: the optimisation of energy consumption.

Keywords: Urban transport, Mass transit, Driverless metro, Signalling, Automatic train control, Automatic train operation, Grade of automation, Simulation, ATC, ATO, CBTC.

© 2010 WUTC Organisers