FREMO Interlocking: Elekdra MR - General Items - Specification

FREMO Interlocking

Elekdra MR -> General Items

25.08.2005

Specification - Concept

This section describes the concept of Elekdra.

Explaination of the Elekdra concept

The word Elekdra means the application, that settles between the hardware and the user interface. The concept incloses, that the user interface is no part of the elekdra interlocking system itself. That opens the possibility, that different types of user interfaces can be used and/or developed.

The explaination should start with the lowest level, the hardware. The Elekdra is designed without a special hardware requirement. So it is possible to use it with any harware that is available. The only thing to develop is a hardware card and a adjustment unit in software for the special device.

The hardware manager

The hardware manager handles the connection between Elekdra and the hardware. This layer takes the information from the adjusment units and writes it to the hardware, or takes the data from the hardware an writes it to the adjustmend units.

The adjustment units

The AUs are units, which are strongly adapted to the underlying hardware. They portray a software picture of the hardware device. The AUs take all the information of the hardware states below out of the logical module and adjust it to be compiant to the underlying hardware.

Both, the hardware manager ans the adjustment units are dependent of the hardware. If a new hardware is used, these units have to be updated.

The logical module

Thi sis the heart of Elekdra. It keeps all the information and deals with commands on an abstract level. If the hardware changes, it does not matter for this module. All the states, the devices have, are stored here. Routes are managed here and commands were executed.

The element layer

The elemement layer consists of abstract interpretations of all elements, that are availlable, like turnouts or signals.

All elements are strongly independent to each other. The cross connection between them is done in th elogical layer.

The logical layer

The logocal layer makes logical connections between the elements below. It has different logical elements like routes or blocks, which can build up thie cross-connections.

The connection manager

The connection manager is part of the UI-module. It supports different user interfaces. For this purposem connection interfaces are used to build up the information in a way, the individual UI can work with.