MINUTES OF COMMITTEE MEETING

 

RAIL TRANSIT VEHICLE INTERFACE STANDARDS COMMITTEE

 

Nov. 9-10, 1999

 

New Jersey Transit, Newark NJ

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(NOTE: ATTACHMENTS ARE NOT INCLUDED IN THE WEBSITE VERSION OF THE MINUTES)

 

 

1. Attendance (See Attachment 1)

 

Note that a current list of members with addresses is provided as Attachment 2. Members should contact Patricia Gerdon of IEEE Standards (FAX 732 562-1571 or email  p.gerdon@ieee.org) with any corrections to this list. Please do not contact the Chair.

 

      Note:  Action Items assigned to committee members are  shown in bold italics.

 

 

2. Agenda (See Attachment 3)

 

 

3. Housekeeping

 

Minutes.  Minutes of the Annapolis meeting (July 20-21, 1999) were approved by the committee without changes.

 

Next Meeting.  It was agreed that the next meeting will be held March 14-15, 2000 at Safetrans offices in the Los Angeles area. Bill Petit will help with meeting room arrangements. The agenda will include final line by line review of WG8 Environmental Standards and initial line by line review of WG10 Battery Physical Standards, decision on whether to create an HRI standards activity, and approval of PAR purpose and scope for a new NiCad Battery Standard activity.

 

Internet. Our website is maintained by Tom Sullivan at:  http://www.tsd.org

Tom's site is directly linked to the IEEE site where password protected draft standards reside because of copyright concerns. The user name and password for accessing draft standards are "transit" and "railway". Working group leaders posting standards to the web should title them DS-P14XX.DOC  Email attachments to Tom for posting may now be sent in either Word 6.0/95 or Word 97. Tom Sullivan reported that our website is receiving 7000 "hits" a month and that they come from all over the world.

 

We also have an IEEE email mailing list:

stds-railtransit@ieee.org

 

The current list of members on the list is shown in Attachment 4. If you are not yet on the list, please sign on using the simple instructions provided in Attachment 4. If you have an incorrect address on the list please "unsubscribe" and if necessary re"subscribe" according to the instructions. You are the only one who can remove the incorrect address! We tend to use the IEEE email list sparingly and only for situations where we must rapidly contact members so you will not be overly burdened with email messages if you subscribe.

 

Progress Report.  Chair McGean announced that at this time five standards have received final approvals. Our latest, IEEE  1474.1,  Communications Based Signaling should be available from IEEE by the end of the year. Two other standards (1476 Auxiliary Power and 1483 Software Safety)  have been successfully balloted and are now being readied for recirculation ballots. The status of all standards activities are provided in Attachment 5.

 

4. Coordination

 

FRA Regulations and Positive Train Control. (Report by Bill Petit) RSAC has two task forces at work on PTC, including one concerned with standards. A report on the state of Positive Train Control is being prepared for submittal to Congress. Contact Bill Petit

 ( bill.petit@ieee.org ) or Grady Cothen of FRA (phone 202 493 6302) for a copy. A task force is to rewrite the rules covering microprocessor based train control systems. Inclusion of a University of Virginia risk assessment process is being considered. Another issue is third party review of safety. Operators would like a safety audit while labor is pushing for an independent safety assessment. The new rules are scheduled to be released for public comment as Federal Regulations (Notice of Proposed Rulemaking NPRN) by the end of this year. If this does not happen, FRA will take over and write these proposed rules for microprocessor based train control systems themselves. It was noted that suppliers participate in RSAC as technical experts but are not allowed to vote. Complete minutes of RSAC meetings are on the Safetran website, www.safetran.com 

 

 

 

ASME Developments. (Report by the Chair)  Stan Canjea's ASME Standards Committee on Rail Transit Vehicles held its fourth meeting in Orlando after the APTA annual meeting.  Comments received from review of the first draft of the Crashworthiness Standard were reviewed in detail. Anyone wishing a copy of the draft should contact Joseph Pang of the ASME at  pangj@asme.org and ask for the RT-1 draft standard. The draft is also on the ASME website which is linked to ours at www.tsd.org  The committee intends its next meeting to be in Sacramento during April, 2000 when the revised second draft prepared in response to comments will be reviewed.

 

PRESS Activities. (Report by Dave Phelps) Dave noted that at the last APTA PRESS meeting FRA stated they are planning to update their event recorder standard and will be making use of IEEE 1482.1, the event recorder standard prepared by Linda Sue Boehmer's WG3. PRESS met October 28th in Wilmington. They now have 60 standards approved and some 50 published which are available through APTA. 17 are electrical standards. Email Dave dphelps@apta.com  to get copies. APTA is the PRESS  Standards Development Organization. Overall, PRESS is moving now into the next phase which will be maintaining and updating its standards. Dave noted they have been careful to avoid overlap with our IEEE standards activities.

 

APTA is now moving into developing rail transit standards (LRT and rapid rail as opposed to just commuter rail as was done by PRESS). The work will be modeled after the PRESS activity. A Rail Transit Standards Technical Working Group has been formed. It has four priority areas: Crashworthiness, Grade Crossings, Vehicle Maintenance and Inspection and Fixed Facility Maintenance and Inspection. Dave said APTA would coordinate its crashworthiness work with the ASME work being done by Stan Canjea.

 

APTA Rolling Stock Technical Forum (Formerly APTA Rolling Stock Committee). (Report by Dave Phelps) The forum met in Orlando during the annual meeting. They discussed the ADA issue of intercar barriers. A white paper is being prepared on the subject. ADA requires  protection of the disabled in the intercar area but does not say barriers are required.  Many properties need help in this area in order to comply. One question is whether fiberglass car ends can structurally handle a chain type barrier. A menu of workable solutions is the likely outcome. There will be 1-2 sessions sponsored by the Rolling Stock Technical Forum at the June APTA rapid rail conference in Saint Louis. The next meeting of the Rolling Stock Technical Forum will also be during the St. Louis meeting.

 

ITS/APTA Advanced Public Transit Systems Rail Subcommittee. (Report by Dave Phelps)  This group has been formed to identify ITS related development needs of the rail transit industry and further their development. They are working with the FTA Joint Program office on final guidance mandating the architecture for ITS. The group is headed by Tom Taylor of PB Systems (213 362 4769 FAX 213 362 3106, email taylorts@pbworld.com )  Contact Lou Sanders of APTA (202 898 4086 FAX 202 898 4019, email lsanders@apta.com ) if you are interested. The APTS committee last met in Toronto. Future meetings are documented in Attachment  6 to these minutes.  Terrell Williams ( terrell.williams@fta.dot.gov  ) is preparing an FTA white paper on rail APTS issues for delivery at the January TRB meeting.

 

OMG Website. Bob diSilvestro has organized a website to discuss the advantages and disadvantages of CORBA, DCOM, and the TCIP approach to message sets. The URL is www.ieee-omg.org  A user name and password are required which can be obtained from Bob DiSilvestro at disilvestro_bob@adtranzna.com

 

LonMark Interoperability Association. (report by Tom Sullivan)  LTK Engineering Services Jim Lyke will act as an extension of NYCT and cochair the new transportation group with Gene Sansone. Tom Sullivan will now become more involved in bus areas. They have concluded that the easiest area to approach first will be Passenger Information. Tom McGean noted that this is an area with TCIP data elements which have been standardized by ITE so coordination will be necessary. The LonMark Group has the WG9 Rosin data elements and will try to dovetail with them. Bombardier is providing relevant information on the NYCT cars. Meetings will continue to be held in conjunction with IEEE RTVISC meetings. The LonMark website is www.lonmark.org. It was noted that the Washington Metro is not using the Physical Layer requirements of IEEE 1473. The Chair was asked to discuss this with Lance Cooper. This has been done and Lance agreed to contact Mark Hooley of New Jersey Transit to see what they are doing in this area. It was noted that LonWorks is now an ANSI/EIA standard.

 

Transit Signal Priority.  (Tom Sullivan reporting)  A meeting was held in November and the next meeting will be December 1st at College Station, Texas. Tom Sullivan will post details on the web at www.tsd.org Ron Atherly of King County (Seattle) is leading the effort.

 

Transit Standards Consortium. (Dave Phelps and Paul Jamieson reporting) Dave Phelps noted that a Transit Standards Consortium has been formed as an IRS certified  not-for-profit organization intended to promote and coordinate US transit standards activities. They have also been recognized as an advisor to FTA but are not yet formally a "Federal Advisory Committee." Their website is www.tsconsortium.org  The new Chairman of the Board is Paul Jamieson and the new head of the TSC Technical Council is Jim Kemp, both of whom are also members of our committee. Paul Jamieson reported they need to hire an executive director and establish a working relationship with APTA. A memo of understanding is presently being negotiated with APTA.  TSC is a way of pooling industry resources. (Report is provided as Attachment 7)

 

Other Business

 

Appointment of Officers.  The committee needs to fill the positions of Vice Chair and Secretary. Chair McGean asked the Steering Committee to nominate persons and they selected Tom Sullivan and Linda Sue Boehmer. Committee Policy and Procedures call for the secretary to be appointed by the Chair. The Chair appointed Tom Sullivan to this position. Rules call for the Vice Chair to be elected by the committee. At this meeting the committee elected Linda Sue Boehmer Vice Chair unanimously by acclamation.

 

Software Documentation Standard (New WG 12) .  (report by Paul Jamieson) The committee held its third meeting at LTK in New York September 23-24, 1999. The title, scope and purpose were modified by removing the words "transit" because discussions are underway with RSAC about possible use of this standard. The PAR was submitted in November. A fourth meeting is scheduled at PBT in Newark, January 12-13, 2000. A report is provided as Attachment 8 along with current scope and purpose.

 

IEEE 16 Standard (New WG11) . (Report by Jim Dietz)  A meeting is planned in December. Jim Dietz is drafting a PAR and a working group has been formed. A title purpose and scope have been developed. It will not be limited to transit.  Jim will put the scope, title and purpose on the web and McGean will put it out on email to all on our IEEE reflector with a deadline for any comments. To get involved contact Jim Dietz at 215 542 0700, FAX 215 542 7676 email jdietz@ltk.com.

 

IEEE11 Ballot.  Linda Sue Boehmer said the standard work has been complete but they may need help preparing the final ballot report for RevCom. Tom McGean was asked to contact Ed Priebe, chair of the Working Group to see if he could help. This has been done and RTVISC has offered to help with putting the report together.

 

Funding for Protocol Implementation. WG1, Communications Protocols, has recommended a Gateway/TCN Demonstration Project as being desirable to reduce the P1473 Standard to practice. The project would provide evidence that the TCN standard as written is sufficient and complete by developing a North American implementation, and would also develop the gateway between TCN and Echelon needed to make P1473 a reality. A "Consortium for Communications Protocol Implementation" has been formed and a proposal submitted to the FTA Joint Partnership Program in the Consortium's name. FTA has advised the proposal was highly rated but funding remains a problem, since the JPP program is not directly funded.  FTA persons involved in the Joint Partnership Program include Tony Yen (202 366-0264, Don Durkee (202 366-0942) and Ed Thomas (202 366-0264). While Tom McGean has served as acting consortium coordinator, Bombardier has tentatively agreed to take over that responsibility.

 

Highway Rail Intersection (Possible New WG14).  (Bill Petit reporting)  A key concern is that the National ITS Architecture places the crossing gates in the roadway system, not the wayside terminator (railway system). At the last meeting at College Station, the lunchtime speaker was the FRA Administrator indicating the importance of this area.  A Draft report of the July meeting is due out the end of this year. Two standards areas were identified; the rail-roadway interface and the rail operations-traffic operations interface. Bill stated that the rail operations-traffic operations areas was best handled by WG9 but proposed a new working group to identify standards for the rail-roadway interface.  The committee unanimously voted to appoint an HRI task force to determine whether standards activity should be undertaken by our committee in this area. The Chair appointed Bill Petit to head this task force The task force will report at our next meeting in the Los Angeles area.

 

Bill Petit with the help of Tom Sullivan and Tom McGean is to put together an article on HRI, Transit Signal Priority, NTCIP, TCIP etc. to be published in VTS News, Passenger Transport, Railway Age etc. to serve as an alert to the rail transit industry on these important NTCIP issues on the horizon and get the word out.

 

NiCAD Battery Standard (New WG 13).  (Claude Gabriel reporting ) The WG6 work has made clear that a NiCad battery electric performance standard for transit cars is needed. A meeting was held at LTK in Philadelphia attended by a representative of the current stationary NiCad standard and it was agreed our committee should be the one to sponsor this activity. It was moved by Dave Phelps and seconded by Fred Perelstein that our committee should sponsor a working group to develop a recommended practice for NiCad battery electrical performance, providing that a person to chair the working group comes forward. The motion further authorized the working group to prepare a PAR including title, purpose and scope for review by the committee at its next meeting in the Los Angeles area. The motion passed unanimously. (See Attachment  9 report)

 

Information Dissemination.  Linda Sue Boehmer has notified Dennis Bodson who is working with the IEEE Standards Office to see about bundling our standards so they can be purchased as a single document. Lou Sanders and Chris Jenks are working on distributing our standards to transit agencies. TRB and APTA will provide funds to buy 150 copies of the first 5 standards for distribution to transit agencies. They will wait until the CBTC standard 1474.1 is published.

 

IEEE Standards Process.  Tricia Gerdon, ( p.gerdon@ieee.org )our IEEE Staff advisor attended the meeting. She gave a presentation on changes in the IEEE Standards Process now underway. Automatic balloting is being developed using Adobe files. The Chair agreed to send Tricia the names of current WG chairs still preparing standards (WG4, WG6 and WG8 and higher) for her to send current versions of the Style Manual, Standards Companion, and other relevant information. A style template can be downloaded from http://standards.ieee.org/resources/spasystem/index/html   Tricia can also help setting up a free bulletin board for your working group. The Chair also agreed to email the WG chairs to see how many would like a standards training session tagged on to our next west coast meeting. If there is interest Tricia will set one up.

 

5.      Working Group Reports

(To facilitate followup by working group leaders activities have been organized by working   group even though the agenda did not follow this approach  at the actual meeting).

 

Definitions. Paul Jamieson Chair. A policy statement drafted by the Chair to reflect the sense of the committee on definitions is given below:

 

It is committee policy to use IEEE Dictionary definitions if at all possible. Further, once any definition has been balloted and accepted for use in any standard sponsored by the IEEE Rail Transit Vehicle Interface Standards Committee it shall be binding for all other standards sponsored by the committee unless it can be shown to be clearly inappropriate. If neither the IEEE Dictionary nor a RTVISC balloted standard provides a suitable definition, then the American Society of Mechanical Engineers Lexicon should be consulted for a suitable definition.. Next, standards sponsored by the ASME Rail Transit Standards Committee should be consulted. Definitions which have been  balloted and accepted for any standard sponsored by the ASME Rail Transit Standards Committee shall be also binding for all IEEE RTVISC standards unless there is a different existing IEEE definition or they  can be shown to be clearly inapplicable.  If none of these sources produce a suitable definition,  the  TRB Glossary should be consulted .  It should be noted that  ASME and  TRB Glossary definitions are not presently IEEE definitions. Thus, they should be provided in the definitions section of the IEEE standard so they can be balloted and adopted as an IEEE definition. Only when all of the above approaches has failed should a working group coin its own original definition. Since it is intended that all working groups of both IEEE RTVISC and ASME RTSC use common definitions,  Working group chairs should be careful when reviewing standards prepared by other working groups, to be sure the other group's definitions will be suitable for their standard also. Paul Jamieson chairs the Definitions working group for both the IEEE RTVISC and the ASME RTSC and maintains a database with all definitions which can be downloaded from our website at  www.tsd.org.

 

WG1 (P1473) Communications Protocols on Trains, Bob Anderson Chair. The WG1 standard IEEE 1473 has been published.

 

WG2 (P1474.1) Communications Based Train Control, Alan Rumsey, Chair  The P1474.1 standard has received final approval and is now being final edited for publishing. It should be published by the end of the year. When this is complete the TRB and APTA will arrange to buy 150 copies of our first five standards from IEEE to disseminate. A meeting of WG2 will be held in early 2000 to discuss the next step.

 

WG3 (P1482) Rail Vehicle Monitoring and Diagnostic Systems, Linda Sue Boehmer,  The Event Recorder standard has been published. Activity to reactivate the maintenance and diagnostics effort is being considered.

 

WG4 (P1483) Safety Standards for Software Systems, Jim Hoelscher,  This standard's ballot closed August 19th. It passed with five negatives. A meeting was held in Rochester October 22nd to review the comments and resolve negative comments. An effort will be made to prepare a new draft for recirculation ballot in time that a ballot report can be submitted to the IEEE by the upcoming December 17th deadline.

 

WG5 (P1475) VOBC/Propulsion Controller/Motor/Brake, Dave Phelps, Chair. The WG5 standard IEEE 1475 has been published. WG5 is now helping WG9 with identifying propulsion, braking and master control interface data elements.

 

WG6 (P1476) Auxiliary Power Systems, Claude Gabriel, Chair The ballot on this standard passed with one negative which has been resolved. Response to comments resulted in several substantive changes which will be identified for a recirculation ballot. An effort will be made to prepare a new draft for recirculation ballot in time that a ballot report can be submitted to the IEEE by the upcoming December 17th deadline. Claude will provide the Chair by December 1st the final draft of the standard along with a list of the substantive changes made from the previous ballot.

 

The following action items were assigned:

 

Jim Dietz Working Group 11 is to define what we mean by galvanic isolation as part of the WG11 motor control  standard.

 

The tables which had been moved from the main body of the standard to informative annexes were discussed. It is now planned to place blank table formats in the body of the standard and then refer to the Annex for an illustration of how one would fill out the table.

 

IEEE has advised it is OK for us to use notes to amplify our definitions but we should be aware the notes will not be included when the definitions are added to the IEEE Dictionary. It was also noted that the IEEE Dictionary should always be included in the list of references.

 

In his affirmative comments Jim Kemp provided a table identifying commands and status variables for the auxiliary power system.  The full committee unanimously accepted Jim Kemp's table as a strawman and asked WG6 to critique the list, expand if necessary, and forward it in the form of a "white paper"  to WG9, WG3, and the full committee for their use. WG6 was also asked to recommend to the full committee in conjunction with Jim Kemp the best future use of this table (should it become part of a recommended practice, be subsumed by WG9 etc.)

 

WG7 P1477) Vehicle Passenger Information Standards, Lance Cooper, Chair  The standard has been published as an IEEE standard. Lance had been considering whether to reactivate the committee to develop the logical interface in cooperation with Rob's WG9 and the Passenger Information work of TCIP.  The committee recommends that the Psasenger Information logical interface be done as part of Rob McHugh's TCIP effort, rather than by submitting a new PAR. It asks that WG7 people work with Rob's WG9 in this area.

 

WG8 (P1478) Environmental Standards for Rail Transit Equipment, Chuck Elms, Chair. Line by Line review was undertaken at this meeting. The following actions are noted:

 

·        Jim Dietz is to provide Chuck suggested test references for 4.1.1 to 4.1.3

 

·        Harold Gillen is to provide Chuck a lightning reference for rolling stock.

 

·        Bob Anderson is to get Chuck a copy of the 1997 AREMA Signal Manual which must be used as the resource for our standard.

 

·        Jim Dietz is to email Chuck temperature limit footnotes for Table 1.

·        Tom McGean is to give Chuck values of solar radiation at the equator.

 

Chuck will prepare a new draft of the standard for final line by line review at the next meeting in Los Angeles. The version of the draft as it emerged annotated from the Newark meeting is provided as Attachment 10.

 

WG9 Transit Communications Interface Profiles for Rail Transit Systems, Rob McHugh, Chair. Eva Lerner Lam noted that a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking will require transit properties to be compliant with ITS standards to get federal funding. This could mean requiring TCIP standards although it is not certain. Eva also noted that at the international level TCIP is on the ISO TC204 agenda for possible adoption. There are agreements that USDOT will fund harmonizing TCIP with European standards.

 

The committee discussed the status of WG9 work at length. WG9 has done some outstanding work collecting existing data elements from ROSIN, LonMark, and the legacy of NYCT R142 cars. The question is what to do next. The committee agreed unanimously that WG9 had two directives from the committee which were consistent with its PAR.

 

·        First, to identify what onvehicle data elements must go outward to TCIP business areas. In this case WG9 needs to determine whether we can use existing TCIP data elements (developed with motor buses in mind) or whether we need our own rail data elements and in the latter case WG9 should generate them.

 

·        Second to identify a minimum set of onboard data elements which must be standardized to permit subsystem level and car to car interoperability.

 

Efforts are underway by the Chair to identify persons to help WG9 in these areas.  As an example of the second item, Dave Phelps has extracted 36 data elements from IEEE 1475 that need to be matched from the WG9 database. It was noted that IEEE 1473 gives preeminence to ROSIN for identifying data elements. It was also noted that UIC556 describes communications on trains using TCN.

 

Attachment 11 is the WG9 report. Attachment 12 is minutes from the last meeting.

 

WG10 Battery Standard, Stanley Kwa, Chair.  A new PAR has been submitted. The group should have a draft finished by the end of the year. It will be reviewed at the next committee meeting in the Los Angeles area. Participation by more midwest and western transit agencies in this working group is needed and requested. Contact Stan Kwa at 212 492 8307, Fax 212 492 8360, email CEENTS07SK@aol.com. Attachment 13 is the WG10 report.

 

 

 

7.      Special Thanks

 

Special thanks are due to New Jersey Transit for providing the excellent meeting facilities and especially to Jim Kemp for a great job with meeting arrangements including arranging for refreshments and lunch, arranging for meeting rooms and equipment, and arranging for an outstanding dinner nearby. Thanks for a great job!

 

 

8.  Adjournment

 

The meeting was adjourned at 4PM on November 11th  1999.