Assets4Rail shares the Shift2Rail view of having an ageing European railway infrastructure that needs to cope with the expected increased traffics in the future. Likewise, reliable rolling stock will be required to crystallize the desired modal shift to rail. Both goals relay on a proactive and cost-effective maintenance and intervention system in the assets.
Assets4Rail aims to contribute to this modal shift by exploring, adapting and testing cutting-edge technologies for railway asset monitoring and maintenance. To achieve that, Assets4Rail follows a twofold approach, including infrastructure (tunnel, bridges, track geometry, and safety systems) and vehicles.
A dedicated information model (BIM) will be the keystone of the infrastructure part of the project. This model with integrated algorithms will gather and analyze the information collected by specific sensors which will monitor subsurface tunnel defects, fatigue consumption, noise and vibrations of bridges as well as track geometry.
On the other hand, train monitoring will include the installation of track-side and underframe imaging automated system to collect data for detecting specific types of defects that have non-negligible impacts on infrastructure. The additional use of the RFID technology will enable the smooth identification of trains and single elements, associated with the identified rolling stock failures. The combination of mentioned real-time collected data with existing data along the implementation of deep learning techniques for assessing large data volumes will pave the way towards a cost-effective and proactive maintenance process of infrastructure and rolling stock.
In addition, two innovative intervention methods, noise rail dampers and the cleaning of long tunnel drainage pipes, will be validated on field.
The overall objective of Assets4rail is to contribute to the objective of the Innovation Programme 3 of Shift2Rail which is to achieve cost efficient and reliable railway infrastructures (https://shift2rail.org/research-development/ip3/). To that aim, Assets4Rail is divided into two Workstreams that have specific objectives.
A) Workstream 1 objective is to contribute improving the inspection, maintenance and upgrade methods for cost reduction and quality improvement of railway bridges and tunnels; and to reduce noise and vibration in bridges.
B) Workstream 2 objective is to contribute to build a common measuring and monitoring data representation layer suitable to elaborate data coming from all source segments (onboard, wayside and remote), to correlate the different data and to obtain a holistic view of the railway system conditions.
December 2018 - May 2021
This project is funded by Shift2Rail (EU-H2020). Project reference: 826250
For more information check the project website: http://www.assets4rail.eu/
Click here to subscribe to the project newsletter.
