Comparison of Collision Avoidance Systems and Applicability to Rail Transport

Abstract

The paper presents an overview of the state of the art in collision avoidance related with transportation systems like the automatic identification system (AIS) for maritime transportation, traffic alert and collision avoidance system/automatic dependent surveillance-broadcast (TCAS/ADS-B) for aircraft, and the car-2-car communication system (C2C) for road transportation. The examined systems rely on position detection and direct communication among vehicles. Alike a collision avoidance system for railway transportation "RCAS" is introduced. Focussing on the communication aspects, possible applicability of the examined state of the art systems to RCAS is studied. The analysis are performed at different communication system layers, namely application (APP) layer, media access control (MAC) layer and physical layer (PHY), which are the most relevant for a single hop network broadcast system as favorized in RCAS. Since multihop and addressed communication are not foreseen in a first RCAS approach, the network layer is not taken into account.