Faster digitisation

The fact that rail trans­port is in urgent need of fur­ther digi­ti­sa­tion is beyond ques­tion. In prac­tice, how­ever, there are some hur­dles for system sup­pliers and inte­gra­tors to over­come. His­tor­i­cally, spe­cific solu­tions have been devel­oped for the dif­ferent appli­ca­tions. These are barely stan­dard­ised and are now mostly to be replaced during ongoing oper­a­tion. The dig­ital solu­tions must be inte­grated into the existing infra­struc­ture, and ulti­mately the solu­tions also need the rel­e­vant railway sector approvals, oth­er­wise imple­men­ta­tion will be delayed con­sid­er­ably.

The automa­tion system PSS 4000 from Pilz was orig­i­nally devel­oped for indus­trial appli­ca­tions. Thanks to its flex­i­bility and open­ness it has also been used in the railway sector for many years. To better sat­isfy the par­tic­ular require­ments of rail trans­port, Pilz devel­oped the system fur­ther and launched spe­cial mod­ules with ‑R (“Railway”) in the type descrip­tion – which included spe­cific railway approvals.

At Inno­Trans 2024, Pilz will now be launching a new, safe and mod­ular railway con­trol system for the dig­ital railway. PSS­rail has railway approval, meets safety require­ments up to SIL 4, is com­pat­ible with the EULYNX stan­dard and is mod­ular, and there­fore flex­ible to use. The inno­v­a­tive char­acter of PSS­rail lies in the com­bi­na­tion of these func­tions.

It con­sists of the actual con­troller, suit­able for SIL 4, as well as var­ious hard­ware mod­ules, including a CAN module for simple inte­gra­tion of existing sys­tems. PSS­rail also has a soft­ware suite for pro­gram­ming or con­fig­u­ra­tion of user pro­grams. Railway-cer­ti­fied func­tion blocks are stored in a pro­gram library, enabling simple, faster imple­men­ta­tion. Thanks to this building-block prin­ciple, users can design their solu­tions to suit their needs.

System sup­pliers and inte­gra­tors can use PSS­rail for the most varied sig­nalling appli­ca­tions, including elec­tric locally oper­ated points or level cross­ings, as well as in dig­ital inter­lock­ings. In this case, for example, PSS­rail can be used as an Object Con­troller Plat­form, so that con­trol of the field com­po­nents along the track is dig­ital, and there­fore reli­able and eco­nom­ical.

Mr Lüke, why is PSSrail a genuine innovation?

With the safe, mod­ular railway con­troller PSS­rail we are set­ting new stan­dards in digi­ti­sa­tion of the railway infra­struc­ture. We are enabling system sup­pliers and inte­gra­tors to create indi­vid­u­ally tai­lored con­trol solu­tions with little effort. The solu­tion is scal­able, from single level cross­ings to smaller inter­lock­ings.

What does the package look like specifically?

PSS­rail is a com­pre­hen­sive building block system with hard­ware and soft­ware. It includes every­thing you need to imple­ment dig­ital con­trol solu­tions. Every­thing is stan­dard­ised, i.e. based on the RaSTA pro­tocol and EULYNX stan­dard.

By the way, PSS­rail also enables digi­ti­sa­tion to be car­ried out while oper­a­tions are ongoing and, for example, enables an upgrade to the EULYNX stan­dard. Oper­a­tors can mod­ernise obso­lete, relay-con­trolled inter­lock­ings grad­u­ally, increasing the reli­a­bility and effi­ciency of rail trans­port.

What is the benefit for users?

With PSS­rail, system sup­pliers and inte­gra­tors can sig­nif­i­cantly reduce the time and tech­nical effort needed to imple­ment digi­ti­sa­tion projects. This is due in part to the building block prin­ciple men­tioned ear­lier, but also to the avail­able railway approval. Ulti­mately, there is now a tool that can be used to imple­ment the nec­es­sary rail digi­ti­sa­tion quickly, eco­nom­i­cally and flex­ibly.