On the morning of November 20, the "2020 Smart Urban Rail Transit Technology Innovation Forum" was successfully held in Shanghai Science Hall. The forum was hosted by Shanghai Engineering Research Center of Driverless Train Control of Urban Guided Transport and co-hosted by CASCO Signal Ltd. Experts in the field of rail transit came together to this forum to exchange industry insights and share the latest cutting-edge technologies and achievements of China's smart urban rail transit construction. At this meeting, CASCO launched its independently developed train autonomous circumambulation system (TACS) – TRANAVI Qiji, which is also the first commercial TACS in the industry.

Forum

TACS is a signaling system that enables autonomous resource management and active interval protection based on operational plan and real-time location. Compared with the traditional communication based train control system (CBTC), the metro lines with TACS system will have less operation interval, greater transportation capacity and flexibility, which will be a frog leap in the rail transit signaling system, and is expected to become the new driver of increasing the speed and efficiency of the smart rail transit.

"Originated from the ancient Chinese verse album 'Li Sao', which depicted ‘ride on a horse to gallop, to follow the path of my ancestor sages', the word 'Qiji' literally means a best horse and represents the pursuit of high quality travel experience. With its unremitting efforts and the mission of delivering high-quality travel services, CASCO named its independently developed TACS system Qiji."

Wang Xiaoyong, Technical Director of CASCO, explained the name of Qiji

Wang Xiaoyong, Technical Director of CASCO, said that TACS is currently a key train control technology for rail transit in the world. It was listed in the "Encouraged List of Industrial Structure Adjustment Directory" by the National Development and Reform Commission in 2019, however, no mature product or commercial application has yet been released. The debut of TRANAVI Qiji is the result of CASCO's many years of technological innovation, which is a major breakthrough in the core technology of China's rail transit, and has contributed to the development of autonomous control of China's high-performance train control system.

If the popularity of CBTC system in urban rail transit helped China to catch up with the international level of rail transit equipment, then the launch of TRANAVI Qiji will further help consolidate China's leading position in this field. Through three key innovations—platform optimization, system simplification and resource refinement, TRANAVI Qiji has realized autonomous resource management and active interval protection of trains, and provides comprehensive and whole-process safety protection.

Features of TRANAVI Qiji:

• More Secure

The system has realized active request and release of resources by the train, and the safety logic is more complete and strict. With the multi-core secure parallel processing platform, the safety response time is reduced by 30% compared with that of CBTC, so that it can respond to changes in internal and external conditions faster and guide to the safe side earlier.

• More Efficient

The key indicators in the operation of rail transit have been optimized, resulting in more transportation capacity, higher efficiency and better space-time utilization of resources.

• More Flexible

It can provide differentiated operation plans according to different operation scenarios, including turn-back at any point, single-line two-way operation and fast shuttle operation, and can flexibly adapt to changes in passenger flow with different time-space characteristics.

• More Economic

Track-side equipment was reduced, which lowered full life-cycle costs. Transportation capacity can be dispatched according to the volume of passengers, to ensure that capacity matches demand. The rapid coordination of train traction and braking enabled optimal use of energy, which complies with the goal of environmental and sustainable travel.

• Easy to Deploy

With the principle of "centralized onboard system and simplified track-side equipment", the installation and testing workload was greatly reduced, which made it more suitable for uninterrupted transformation, convenient extension and customized upgrading.

As the proverb goes "April showers bring May flowers", the successful launch of TRANAVI Qiji has testified the 10-year hard work of CASCO in making technical breakthroughs. As early as 2010, CASCO identified the demand for better signaling systems brought about by the rapid development of rail transit, and began pre-research on high-performance train control system. The related research results were recognized as the scientific and technological achievements of Shanghai in 2015. Since then, CASCO has invested tremendous R&D resources in system development, and launched the on-site verification project with the support of Shanghai Metro in 2019. With more than a year of efforts, the on-site test of TRANAVI Qiji with multi-vehicle in fully automatic operation mode successfully passed the verification on June 28, 2020, which was the first case in China. It proved that TRANAVI Qiji has reached the predetermined objectives in safety, reliability, functionality and performance, and has met the commercial requirements.

Today, the policy of building a powerful country with transportation technology, and construction of smart urban rail transit has showed us the direction for the smart upgrading of the rail transit industry. The next decade will be a rare "window period" to streamline the construction of transportation infrastructure and establish a modern integrated transportation network. At this tipping point, CASCO successfully launched TRANAVI Qiji, and provided a solution for building new and upgrading existing urban rail transit lines. It will not only help increase the operational efficiency of China's rail transit systems with promotion in informatization, and intelligence of the industry, but also will provide new momentum for building a strong nation with advanced transportation technology and improving the development of new infrastructure.

Innovation with Qiji, working for a better future. As the leader in rail transit control system industry, CASCO will continue to leverage its leading position and expand the horizon of state-of-art technologies in the field of smart urban rail transit. Based on TRANAVI Qiji, it will further explore the potential of high-performance train control system, to contribute to the development of "new infrastructure" and smart urban rail transit.