Information Technology Reference
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to another product competing in an even more fragmented market rather
than promoting an effective product standard. In addition, it needs at least
one strong manufacturer with undoubted reputation and a sound financial
basis in combination with a sucient customer base to enforce a standard in
a certain market. Therefore starting a new product line, by having the need
to catch up with more than a decade of R&D efforts is not an option.
Based on this insight, a viable strategy has to act in two ways:
1. Ground work has to be started to provide an open source reference sys-
tem, based on an unambiguous specification, which means using formal
methods, in order to deliver a reference onboard system as soon as pos-
sible, which can be used to compare various products on the market in
a simulated as well as real world infrastructure test environment. This
device needs to be functionally correct, however does not to be a vital
(or fail-safe) implementation.
2. At least one or better more manufacturers have to be convinced to share-
in into an open source software based business approach by simply con-
verting their existing and approved proprietary ETCS onboard product
into an open source software product by just switching to a FLOSS li-
cense agreement, preferably by using the European Union Public License
(EUPL), including interface definition and safety case documentation. No
“technical” changes are required.
3. Once a formally specified reference FLOSS package has been provided,
implemented on a non-vital reference hardware architecture, according
to step 1, in a future step by step approach all add-on functions and
enhancements and future major software releases should be based on
formal specifications, allowing a migration of the original manufacturer's
software design solution into the formal method based approach, due to
the openness of the product(s) from step 2.
Figure 12 demonstrates this two path approach with a conventional roll-
out scheme, as planned by a supplier, based on proprietary designs (upper
half) and major mile stones for the openETCS project, providing a non-vital
OBU based on formal specification and later migrating to a formally specified
vendor specific implementation of the kernel software (lower half).
Trying to implement an independent formal open source software package
without the backing of at least one strong manufacturer, will most likely fail
if no approved and certified product can be used to start with. The only
promising way to accomplish the crucial second step in this concept is by using
a tender for a su
ciently attractive (large enough) ETCS retrofit project by
adding a request for an OSS license for the software to be delivered. The
EU commission has provided a guideline for such OSS driven tenders, the
so called “OSOR Procurement Guide” (Guideline on public procurement of
Open Source Software, issued March 2010, [26]).
As an example, figure 12 shows the time line for an ETCS retrofit project
for high speed passenger trains to be equipped by 2012 with an pre-baseline
