TÜV Nord China has successfully completed an independent safety assessment of Line 20 of the Shenzhen metro, a fully automated route that runs for 8.4km from Airport North to Convention & Exhibition City, serving five stations.

The company says this is the first time that it has comprehensively inspected and certified a complete fully automatic metro system, including subsystems such as signalling, rolling stock, platform screen doors, communications systems and interfaces with external equipment, as well as the Integrated Supervisory Control System (ISCS).

Driverless train operations on Line 20 are supervised from the control centre. Photo: TUV Nord.

TÜV Nord China assessed compliance with standards EN 50126, EN 50128 and EN 50129, determining whether safety requirements for communications, signalling and data processing systems were met. Reliability, availability and maintainability were also assessed.

Line 20 operates at the highest grade of automation, GoA4, allowing unattended train operation without drivers onboard. The safety assessment included ensuring that the main functions of the train control system were designed in accordance with the Safety Integrity Level 4 (SIL4) requirements of the EN 50129 standard.

Train protection on Line 20 is provided by the TACS system for automatic operations developed by Casco of China, featuring track to train communication.

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