A Scenario-Based Simulation Framework for Testing of Highly Automated Railway Systems
Michael Wild, Jan Steffen Becker, Carl Schneiders, Eike Möhlmann · 2025
Increasing automation is an ongoing effort across various mobility sectors, including the railway domain, promising to address issues such as sustainability, lack of personnel, and enhancing mobility in rural areas. The development of automated railway systems is a challenging task and the validation of safety of such systems in open context remains an open topic. Simulation-based validation of driverless trains can help to ensure safe operation. This paper presents an extension of the open-source train simulator OpenRails to enable doing a closed-loop simulation with the goal of validating the behavior of a system under test within a simulated environment. We propose a possible scenario-based validation approach and present the whole loop including description of an abstract scenario using Traffic Sequence Charts, derivation of a concrete instance of this abstract scenario, and a novel closed-loop play-out. We share our experiences and the current state of our work and give outlook on future directions.