CANopen profiles for rail vehicles (CiA 421, CiA 423, CiA 424, CiA 426, CiA 430, CiA 433)

In order to minimize the effort of system integration, the non-profit users and manufacturers group CAN in Automation (CiA) has established the CANopen Special Interest Group (SIG) rail vehicles (including Deuta, Knorr-Bremse, Luetze, MTU, Selectron/Schneider, Siemens, Voith, Vossloh Kiepe, etc.), which develops CANopen application profiles specifically for rail vehicles.
On the one hand the working group develops a CANopen application profile for the in-vehicle integration network. On the other hand the group develops several application profiles that describe the communication within the different sub-systems such as e.g. diesel engine control, door control or interior/exterior lighting control.

The document CiA 421 train vehicle control network describes the communication via the in-vehicle integration network. This profile describes, which application data has to be provided to the in-vehicle integration network by a certain sub-system. In case e.g. all doors shall be closed, the train operating system needs to know, where to hand over the command to the door control system. From a CANopen point of view this means, to which object in the object dictionary of the door controller, the train operating system has to write the “close all door command”. In addition, the door controller needs to know the structure of the command (e.g. which bit covers the demanded action). This information is standardized in the document CiA 421. In addition the in-vehicle integration network may be connected to a WTB-based train control network via a gateway device. In order to minimize the formatting effort within such a gateway device, the data defined in CiA 421 was harmonized with those defined in UIC leaflet 556.
Working groups, established by the SIG rail vehicles, develop CANopen application profiles for the control of certain sub-systems (e.g. for door control, lighting control, control of the components at the driver’s desk, etc.). The task force (TF) diesel locomotives defines the different components (virtual devices), which may be required for a power (drive) system in railway applications. The group specifies the object dictionary entries, which allow the standardized control of the corresponding virtual device.