Cloud computing has the potential to accelerate the digital journey of railways. Railway systems are big and complex, involving a lot of parts, like trains, tracks, signaling systems, and control systems, among others. The application of cloud computing technologies in the railway industry has the potential to enhance operational efficiency, data management, and overall system performance. Cloud management is essential for complex systems, and the automation of management services can speed up the provisioning, deployment, and maintenance of cloud infrastructure and applications by enabling visibility across the environment. It can provide consistent and unified management over resource allocation, streamline security processes, and automate the monitoring of key performance indicators. Key railway cloud management challenges include the lack of open interfaces and standardization, which are related to the vendor lock-in problem. In this paper, we propose an approach to design the railway cloud resource management as a service. Based on typical use cases, the requirements to fault and performance management of the railway cloud resources are identified. The main functionality is designed as RESTful services. The approach feasibility is proved by formal verification of the cloud resource management models supported by cloud management application and services. The proposed approach is open, in contrast to any proprietary solutions and feature scalability and interoperability.

The virtualization and automation of network functions will be key features of future high-speed railway networks, which have to provide dependable, safe, and secure services. The virtualization of railway network functions will enable functions such as train control, train integrity protection, shunting control, and trackside monitoring and maintenance to be virtualized and to be run on general-purpose hardware. Network function virtualization combined with edge computing can deliver dynamic, low-latency, and reliable services. The automation of railway operations can be achieved by embedding intelligence into the network to optimize the railway operation performance and to enhance the passenger experience. This paper presents an innovative railway network architecture that features distributed intelligence, function cloudification and virtualization, openness, and programmability. The focus is on time-tolerant and time-sensitive intelligent services designed to follow the principles of service-oriented architecture. The interaction between identified logical identities is illustrated by use cases. The paper provides some details of the design of the interface between distributed intelligent services and presents the results of an emulation of the interface performance.

The Future Railway Mobile Communication System (FRMCS) has emerged as a worldwide standard for railway communication. This technology enables the operational efficiency and safety of railways to be improved by providing mission critical communications, machine-type communication for the railway system on board, in addition to trackside telemetry and broadband connectivity for passengers. Different equipment types, users, and functional identities can be involved in communication, and each of them is uniquely identified. Identity management is an important part of the security functions provided by the FRMCS system. This paper presents a service-oriented approach to identity management functionality, enabling service composition for railway applications and service virtualization. This paper studies functionality for the initial registration and subsequent deregistration of railway devices, users, and their functional identities, in addition to the transfer of the registered identities between different FRMCS serving areas while the train moves. Two FRMCS services that follow the principles of representational state transfer architecture are proposed. Services’ functionality is illustrated by use cases, data types, and application programming interfaces that enable services to be interacted with. Identity registration status models are developed, formally described, and mathematically verified. Discussion of the applicability of the proposed services for the implementation of FRMCS security and safety functions is provided. The presented service-oriented approach features a satisfactory level of flexibility and versatility.