Failure management strategies for IoT-based railways systems

Railways monitoring and control are currently performed by different heterogeneous vertical systems working in isolation without or with limited cooperation among them. Such configuration, widely adopted in practical deployments today, is in contrast with the integrated vision of systems that are at the foundation of the smart-city concept. In order to overcome the current fractured ecosystem that monitors and controls railways functionalities, the adoption of a novel integrated approach is mandatory to create an all-in-one railway system. To this aim, new IoT-based communication technologies, like wireless or Power Line Communication technologies, are considered the main enablers to integrate in a very rapid and easy manner existing vertical systems. In this work, we analyse the architecture of future railways systems based on a mix of wireless and Power Line Communication technologies. In our analysis, we aim at studying possible failure management strategies on rail-road switches to improve the level of reliability, crucial requirement for systems that demand maximum resiliency as they manage a critical function of the infrastructure. In particular, we propose a set of solutions aimed at detecting and handling network and sensor failures to ensure continuity in the execution of the basic control functions. The proposed approach is evaluated by means of simulations and demonstrated to be effective in ensuring a good level of performance even when failures occur.