Sammendrag
Railways are considered safest of all in land transport system, yet this safety is due to a complex system of interlocking which ensures the safe train movements on track. Data related to interlockings for a railway track is stored manually in (long) tabular forms, which is a time consuming and resource intensive work, since in most cases this approach results in redundant records, data correctness issues and expensive maintenance of interlocking related documents. With the supplication of computer aided assistance, Engineers are now able to overcome this problem. But due to variance of practices in different railway systems, there is a lack of generic approach in this domain for easy manipulation of Interlocking records. We propose a software implementation of interlocking schema, based on interoperable open XML based data exchange format for railway applications, called railML. Our implementation is directed toward Norwegian railway practices and provides functionality to dynamically create/modify and load interlocking schema from a RailCOMPLETE document, while this XML schema is derived from interlocking specifications presented by Bob Janssen [Bosschaart, Mark, et al. "Efficient formalization of railway interlocking data in RailML." Information Systems 49 (2015): 126-141.] Incorporating a user-friendly editor for interlocking in this prototype performed very promising by limiting excessive work hours and resources being spent without a computer-aided tool and relates improvement in reducing errors in interlocking data. Based on our interaction with railway engineers we present future direction for forthcoming research in this specific domain as more generalized improvements in domain model can make this system reach to wider user base and in turn lead to an easy to understand and configure interlocking design editor for majority of railway systems.