IEEE Rail Transit Vehicle Interface Standards Committee

WG3 Monitoring & Diagnostics 1482

·MUNI conference room on the5th floor at 1145 Market Street

Thurs. Sept.  28, 2000

Meeting 15

 

 

1.  Introduction

Rob McHugh introduced himself and introductions continued around the table (a list of participants is attached). Rob thanked Patty DeVlieg for arranging the MUNI conference room, equipment and coffee break snacks. Rob reviewed the levels of membership and urged everyone to participate at the highest level possible. Rob assured the group of continuing IEEE support and funding.

 

2.Review of the status of the standard

A general discussion regarding the state of the standard and the directions vehicle monitoring technology is moving in, followed. The other related published standards need to be considered.

 

3.Review of the section by section comments

Quester Tangent and BCRTC had prepared comments to the Draft June, 1999

Standard, which had been posted on the TSD.org website.

 

General themes within those comments include:

 

      The vehicle monitoring and diagnostic system has now become a distributed, vehicle level function as opposed to an all inclusive central black box. A central box still exists and is still referred to as the MDS however many vehicle monitoring functions are now implemented within the various vehicle subsystems. This information is reported over the vehicle networks to the MDS for processing, storage, and re-distribution but is also transferred directly between sub-systems using peer to peer communications. It should be noted ( Section 4.2)that many vehicle control functions are being implemented with the MDS systems as this is a convenient place to implement functionality such as light control, heater control, load shedding, etc.

 

      Many of the functional blocks included in the illustrative diagrams in the IEEE 1473 (train network) standard are currently implemented within MDS systems. The MDS is a logical place to implement most of network gateway and routing functionality as it is usually interfaced to the majority of the vehicle networks.

 

      The structure of the MDS as presented in the tables at the beginning of section 4.0 in the draft standard were discussed with the general consensus being that they should be restructured on a functional basis as opposed to a hardware module basis. This would recognize the distribution of MDS functionality across vehicle sub-systems while providing a top level focus to the MDS structure.

 

      The vehicle interface specifications were discussed with a consensus that they should be re-written to be more in line with the formats used in IEEE 1475 which deals with generic input and output interface structures. The protection and isolation aspects were also discussed although these are apparently the subjects of a different committee.

 

      The format of the operators displays and the Bombardier document

currently available on the web were discussed.

      The software quality standards are currently under review by another committee however since then we have been looking at an industrial PLC programming standard known as IEC 61153 (?). We should definitely look at this as a source of inspiration. It has been on the street for quite a while now and there are many commercial products that support it.

      A paragraph on data presentation and post-processing needs to be added.

 

4.0 Coordination with other Working Groups

WG3 will have an informative annex of data elements which will be passed on to WG9 to formalize.

Get full committee concurrence with the change in direction from an equipment based model to a distributed network base functional model. Where does a Reliability section (standard?) belong.

 

5.0 Next Meeting

Dave Phelps offered a room at the new APTA address; 1616 K St. NW for Dec.5, 2000; subject to confirmation.