Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
Fig. 12. Interaction between openETCS project providing formally specified non-
vital reference OBU for validating proprietary as well into OSS converted industrial
products and for future migration to a fully formally specified openETCS software
version to implemented in a market product.
3 proprietary software in 2012, to be added by an open source license as soon
as the first baseline 3 software package is expected to be released.
3.8
Economical Aspects of openETCS for Europe's Railway
Sector
A free of charge, high-quality ETCS vehicle software product on the “market”,
makes it less attractive, under economical aspects, to start a new software de-
velopment or even further development of a different but functionally identi-
cal proprietary software product. This will lead sooner or later to some kind of
cooperation of competing ETCS equipment suppliers, a co-competition with
all those suppliers who can and will adapt their own products by providing
an API to their particular system.
Due to the fact that very different design and safety philosophies have
been evolved in the past years, some of the manufacturers have to decide
either to convert their systems or share-in into the co-competition grouping,
or otherwise stick with costly proprietary software maintenance on their own.
As figure 4 demonstrates clearly that the increase of the software volume
over time may exceed the original volume by a factor of 3. It is unlikely to
assume that the development of the ETCS vehicle software will run much
differently. Then it will be very obvious that for a relatively limited market,
of perhaps up to 50,000 rail cars to be equipped with ETCS in Europe, a
