ABSTRACT

The core aim of this chapter is to sketch the profound challenges that European Committee for Electrotechnical Standardization (CENELEC) standardization in railway signaling is faced with and to demonstrate the strategy and the fields in which CENELEC SC9XA will provide valuable input to the railway signaling community. On the one hand, an ever-diverse homologation environment is to be found in which the various stakeholders are to manifest their interests, whether national safety authorities, the European Railway Agency, European Railway Industry and Railway Duty Holders Associations, or the European and national standardization organizations. This chapter provides an overview of the current state of the art of managing these interests as well as hints at particular aspects. On the other hand, the CENELEC standardization community finds itself burdened with the task of keeping pace with the state of the art mentioned earlier in railway signaling. Hence, incorporating new developments that have already been established as well as enabling future innovation by forging nondiscriminatory goal-oriented standards is vital to this business of drafting standards. Especially information technology security requirements are rapidly growing in various branches of industry and are thus questioning current concepts and demanding answers for yet unsolved challenges. As the CENELEC Committee for Railway Signaling is part of the greater community and network of railway standardization in general, be it European or international, this chapter concludes with identifying and emphasizing new links that have to be established in order to further the interests of railways in the decades to come.