The European Railway Traffic Management System (ERTMS) aims to replace the heterogeneous railway Traffic Management Systems implemented in the different countries of the European Union, promoting interoperability between national systems and, consequently, improving the efficiency of traffic management and facilitating the transit of international freight and passenger trains.

One of the main challenges of ERTMS is meeting the high safety constraints of the railway domain, which becomes even harder considering the digitalization process of transportation systems and their integration with a wide range of services with different Quality of Service requirements. Particularly, while considering a safety-critical ICT platform, one of the most challenging issues is to guarantee time constraints of time-critical tasks in the worst case scenario. This issue can become even more challenging when trying to increase the set of functionalities the system offers, as happens in the digitalization process.

In this paper, a hybrid-virtualized architecture for ERTMS applications is proposed and preliminary tested whose aim is to operate as an ecosystem where hard real-time tasks can run together with soft real-time tasks offering an applications environment flexible, extensible, and, at the same time, suitable to meet strict temporal and high safety requirements, becoming a suitable candidate for the next generation ERTMS applications.