Euro interlocking
The Euro-Interlocking project of the UIC should develop an international standard for configuring new in the 1999 and 2006 Railway - interlocking work. This standard should contain general definitions of terms and processes as well as file formats for electronic data exchange.
The project planning of an interlocking begins with the description of the track network , which routes will be necessary. The result is the interlocking logic and the position information of signaling elements such as signals or Eurobalises .
So far, signal boxes have been built in each country according to their own rules and regulations. For this purpose, the manufacturers of interlockings have to develop their own project planning tools for each country or the project planning must instead be carried out manually without IT support. This high expenditure contributes significantly to the high costs of interlockings.
The need for standardization increased with the introduction of the uniform European train control system ETCS , since the providers of interlockings would now have had to redevelop their ETCS solutions for nationally different types of interlocking configuration.
The work of the Euro-Interlocking project group was discontinued after the UIC funding expired; the standard was not published or adopted. In contrast to RailML , the results were not made available to the professional world as open source , which contributed to the lack of dissemination and implementation.