New Generation Virtualized ERTMS for Interoperable Railway Infrastructure

The European Railway Traffic Management System (ERTMS) is the next-generation traffic management system designed to enhance railway interoperability among European countries. ERTMS must also address critical challenges in the coming years, including reducing the power consumption of railway systems, promoting rail transport as a sustainable mode of transportation, enhancing international connections, and leveraging the vast amount of data produced by TMS to improve service quality. In order to address all these challenges, it is crucial to deploy a new generation ERTMS that is also able to perform a wide set of tasks based on the analysis of data collected from rolling stocks and railway infrastructure; therefore, a push through the softwarization of the components is unavoidable. This paper presents preliminary results on the use of virtualization technologies and microservices as a potential solution to the mentioned challenges, along with a monitoring system to ensure the minimum standard of system safety and predictability.