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 safety of automatic level crossing devices (ALDs) is of utmost importance due to the need to ensure safe passage through railway crossings—accidents must not be allowed. In this paper, an analysis of failures of ALDs in the railway infrastructure in Bulgaria for the period 2020–2022 is performed. First, a statistical evaluation of failures and their duration are calculated. Then, simple reliability indicators have been defined (the time for failure-free operation for different periods, the statistical assessment of the intensity of the failures flow and MTBF) in two ways—considering all failures and their duration or only those due to technical reasons. Finally, the coefficients of availability and unavailability are determined (also in both ways). A comparison was made with the availability coefficients of the indoor devices. The results obtained can be used in determining guidelines for the reconstruction and renovation of signaling systems and railway lines, as well as in identifying conflict points where multi-level crossings should be implemented. It should be noted that performing only a statistical analysis is not enough, it is necessary to determine the reliability indicators and, above all, the availability coefficient.