Bay Area Rapid Transit District Advance Automated Train Control System Case Study Description

Abstract

This document contains an informal description of a portion of the Advanced Automatic Train Control (AATC) system being developed for the Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) system. BART provides commuter rail service for part of California’s San Francisco bay area. Specifically, the informal specification given below focuses on those aspects of BART that are necessary to control the speed and acceleration for the trains in the system. Other aspects of BART control such as (1) communication error recovery, (2) routing (via switches) and (3) right-of-way signaling (via “gates”) are largely ignored. The scope of this case study is narrower than the AATC project as a whole, but within this narrowed scope, enough detail has been supplied to give a sense of the level of complexity involved.

This work was supported by the United States Department of Energy under Contract DE-AC04–94AL85000. Sandia is a multiprogram laboratory operated by Sandia Corporation, a Lockheed Martin Company for the United States Department of Energy.