Comparison of the Parallel and Serial Architectures for N-Version Programming as Applied to Railway Interlocking Systems

The concept of functional safety gains importance with the increasing number of hazardous accidents in the railway industry. In literature, some hardware and software architectures are proposed for the functional safety. As N-version programming is getting popular as preferred software architecture in railway industry, the effect of various hardware implementations of N-version programming on the functional safety remains unclear. In this study, two different hardware setups will be evaluated for N-version programming. After the effect of these hardware setups on the functional safety is analyzed, the effects on the hardware usage and overall response time will be tested on a sample train station.