ICOM: A Communication Framework for Interoperable European Railways

The future European railway system will have to exhibit dramatically improved overall efficiency and performance. In order to achieve this high level goal, the InteGRail project aims to create a holistic, coherent information system, integrating the major railway sub-systems. In this paper we present ICOM, a framework for intelligent communication in InteGRail. This framework follows an application driven approach to integrate the heterogeneous railway networks and to deliver advanced end to end communication services combining QoS, mobility and security via business oriented interfaces. It defines a reference model for further interoperability standardisation in railway communication.