Robustness Analysis for Cost-efficient Future Railway Communications

TheRail Data Network (RDN) is the communication infrastructure deployed along the rail tracks, which enables the exchange of information between all the components in the railway infrastructure. The RDN in modern railway trans-portation systems is critical in ensuring operational safety and efficiency. Combining a nation's RDN and Core Network (CN) via strategically placed interconnection links into a unified optical communication infrastructure has been proposed as a promising solution to ensure throughput and latency requirements of Digital Rail Operation (DRO) and Passenger Connectivity (PC). However, the cost of renting, configuring, and operating all possible interconnection links is too high. Furthermore, there are no guidelines on the appropriate number of interconnection links required to maintain an acceptable level of robustness in the combined network. In this work, we aim to provide guidelines to the Rail Operator (RO) on choosing the interconnection links to minimize the cost of the interconnection links while guaranteeing and maintaining acceptable robustness in the combined network. Robustness surfaces are used to analyze and compare different combined network cases differing on the interconnection links for the German inter-city railway. The main findings reveal that the proposed interconnection of the RDN and CN improves the robustness to nearly the maximum achievable while reducing 75% of the costs for the German inter-city railway.