Toward an Advanced Level Crossing Control Enabled by Train–infrastructure Communication

Abstract

This paper proposes a novel level crossing (LC) control architecture designed for railway systems operating under ERTMS Levels 2 and 3. The approach aims to prevent identified hazardous scenarios and to facilitate the integration of LCs into the ERTMS/ETCS framework by moving from passive control schemes to a supervised, communication-based paradigm. The proposed strategy specifically addresses two critical issues: excessive level crossing closure time (ELCCT) and overly short opening durations (OSOD), both of which may lead to unsafe road user behavior. A formal behavioral model based on Time Petri Nets (TPN) is developed using a modular approach to represent the interactions between LC control and railway traffic. The model is enriched with observers to express safety requirements as temporal logic properties, which are verified using model-checking techniques with the TINA tool. The results show that the proposed architecture effectively prevents the considered risky scenarios.