A new voting strategy in Diverse programming for railway interlocking systems

Abstract

The main issue in controlling systems such as nuclear power reactors or railway systems is to provide safety at the highest level where risk ratio is high and sometimes small errors might result with death of several people. In order to improve reliability and keep safety of such systems at the required level by decreasing common cause failures at the same time Diverse programming (which is synonymous with N-version programming) technique can be used. In this study an example railway interlocking architecture is explained and a new voting strategy is also proposed.