SIMULATION ENVIRONMENT TO VALIDATE HITACHI’S ON-BOARD CBTC EQUIPMENT FOR LINE 1 OF THE HO CHI MINH CITY METRO

Hitachi, Ltd. is currently working on development of the CBTC system for Line 1 of the Metro in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam. Development work considered validation of the system at Hitachi’s Mito Works laboratory (Japan) as a basic requirement prior to final installation on the track.

CITEF has been chosen by Hitachi to supply, install and start up the simulation-based validation system for the on-board CBTC system on Line 1 of the Ho Chi Minh City Metro. The system was installed, tested and commissioned at the end of 2017 by a number of CITEF engineers at the Mito Works facilities, working closely alongside the Hitachi project development engineers.

Development comprised a simulator to verify and validate real on-board CBTC equipment. Due to the extensive scalability and flexibility of CITEF products, this was based on previous developments already carried out for Hitachi.

The main objective was to upgrade and adapt tools for testing the on-board CBTC equipment to include the characteristics of the CBTC system used in Ho Chi Minh City. Among other modifications and extensions, CITEF has been tasked with implementing the new interfaces between the real on-board equipment and the simulation modules, and modifying a number of CBTC functions to adapt them to the Ho Chi Minh City system, which operates at level GoA2.

The system simulates the entire infrastructure of Line 1 of the Ho Chi Minh City Metro, the CBTC track equipment and the full dynamics of a train, and includes a real on-board unit for the purposes of verifying the functioning of the system in conditions which are very similar to real operating conditions.



The main advantage of this type of simulator is a major reduction of the effort entailed by testing and start-up of the various real units involved, thereby lowering the costs of any CBTC project.