With more than 7,000 students, the FH Campus Wien is the largest university of applied sciences in Austria. The university has nine Centers of Excellence that offer application-oriented research and development. One of them is the Vienna Institute for Safety and Systems Engineering (VISSE). VISSE is best known for its academic knowledge in the field of functional safety and system safety. The institute deals with research questions of inherent system safety for autonomous systems.
In a three-year research project AuSoDoTS (Autonomous Secondary-line on-Demand open-Track Systems) a topological safety concept for autonomous people mover operation on single-track railway lines was developed. The result of this project is a major input for the simulation tool.
The challenges during the development of the simulator are, on the one hand, safe operation to avoid collisions and deadlocks. On the other hand, the efficient allocation of the "demands" to the individual vehicles is required. Since a regulated timetable is not possible in "on-demand" mode, the vehicle requests of the passengers are generated in the simulator by means of a random generator. In special operating modes such as "commuter operation", the random requests are generated with defined constraints.