UK: The Rail Safety & Standards Board has released a standard promoting the wider use of Coordinated Universal Time and the consistent formatting of date and time values across the railway network.
This aims to help the industry combine and analyse data, specify new systems and maintain cybersecurity.
RSSB said current systems rely on different time sources, including satellite-based, radio and networked clocks. Currently, UTC lags behind atomic clock time by 37 sec and GPS time by 18 sec, which complicates the comparison of timestamps across systems.
The standard sets out:
- definitions to help describe attributes of time and how it is measured;
- guidance on different sources of time and date information available and how they differ from each other;
- factors which may affect the time and date recorded or displayed by a clock, including cybersecurity considerations;
- a common approach for the description of clock accuracy, resolution, drift and synchronisation;
- requirements on the formatting and presentation of time and date values, with dates to be recorded as YYYY-MM-DD or YYYYMMDD.
‘RSSB’s closest predecessor, the Railway Clearing House, led the standardisation of time across the country, publishing its first standard, about time, on September 22 1847’, said RSSB’s Director of Standards Tom Lee on January 14.
‘A 21st century digital railway is built on consistent and accurate time data, and our new standard supports this, helping to synchronise systems, improving real-time and post-event analysis, and enabling more effective incident investigations.’
