Automation of tests for the compliance of On-Board Units to European Train Control System requirements: development and validation of a robotic system control

The thesis work has been developed at the RINA Services Railway Certification Laboratory and it aims at the complete automation of the test execution for the compliance to the European functional requirements of European Train Control System (ETCS) On-Board unit. The test scope is to verify the compliance of the ETCS On-Board unit with a list of functional requirements specified at European level to guarantee the Interoperability within the European Railway network. The laboratory that performs these tests has to be equipped with different tools that interact each other and with the On-Board Unit under test. In RINA Railway Certification Laboratory, during test execution, the only aspect still not automated is the interaction of an operator with the Driver Machine Interface (DMI) of ETCS On-Board unit: a display (dimension 155 mm x 212 mm) installed on train dashboard, which allows the driver to interact with the ETCS system and control the train. In order to fully automate the process replacing the technician with the task to operate on the DMI during test execution, the Automatic Driver Simulator (ADS) has been developed, which include both hardware and software components. The hardware component is a robotic finger constituted by three different actuators, three step-motor controllers, a supply unit and a PLC that controls all the other components. The software component, which has been developed in LabVIEW as well as all the Laboratory architecture already present, has the task to receive the commands from the other tools of the laboratory and to send them to the hardware part according to a scheduled timing. After the development phase, the system has been validated against technical and functional requirements . The technical requirements refer to the hardware part and they take into account the accuracy and the repeatability of the system. In order to validate the robotic system against these requirements, a series of uniform shifts has been performed, replacing the DMI with a graph paper glued on a piece of polystyrene in order to acquire all the needed measures. The obtained results shown that the system respects the technical requirements, thus considering validated the hardware components. On the other hand, the functional requirement refers to the software part and includes the verification of the correct system behavior, the correct communication with the other tools and the ability to provide a feedback. To test the compliance to these requirements, the debug tools of LabVIEW were used to check for possible misbehaviors of the software and then some official test sequences were run in order to check the system functionalities. All the functional requirements were respected too, so the system has been completely validated. In addition, a reliability analysis of the system has been carried out.