Hurtling through a noisy tunnel with only dim evacuation lighting and walls covered in power supply and communications cabling - you must be on an LU service, surely? But in fact you could equally be a particle whizzing through some of the largest scientific instruments on Earth! The similarities between modern railways and these machines continue with centralised and distributed control systems, safety-critical interlocking implementations, demanding availability and expensive penalties. The adoption of the same new trends can also be seen in both industries - conversion to commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) solutions, the use of cloud services and introducing machine learning for failure insights and mitigation.
This talk will explore these similarities and compare the evolution of infrastructure for both applications.
Laurence Stant is a radio-frequency engineer at Diamond Light Source, the UK's national synchrotron particle accelerator. His early interest in railways probably encouraged him to pursue a BSc in Physics and later PhD in Microwave Engineering from the University of Surrey, Guildford. He is a volunteer at Didcot Railway Centre in the S&T and Civils departments and was previously with the Swindon Panel Society where he developed an interest in signalling control and interlocking systems.