Development of Functional Requirements for Sustainable and Attractive European Rail Freight

Project Information

FR8RAIL

Grant agreement ID: 730617

DOI 10.3030/730617

Project closed

EC signature date 9 August 2016

Start date 1 September 2016

End date 31 August 2019

Funded under

• SOCIETAL CHALLENGES - Smart, Green And Integrated Transport

Total cost € 3 478 222,51

EU contribution € 3 478 222,51

Coordinated by

TRAFIKVERKET - TRV
Sweden

Periodic Reporting for period 4 - FR8RAIL (Development of Functional Requirements for Sustainable and Attractive European Rail Freight)

Reporting period: 2019-01-01 to 2019-08-31

Summary of the context and overall objectives of the project

Freight business in rail suffers from low margins and relatively weak performance and accuracy in the operations. It mainly goes back to a high degree of manual routines and handling in operations as well as not accurate digitalized customer communication processes.

Other effecting externalities and societal challenges is an increasing demand on lower impact on noise and more friendly track performance. Clients/Customers also expect higher degree of predictability and reliability in rail.

The political will, according to the “White Paper”, is to increase the rail freight volumes with 30 % until year 2030, which also puts the issue of better capacity planning in focus.

FR8RAILs objectives are to define the requirements for greater share of automation with digitalization as an enabler.

The operations efficiency and reliability and customer services should be improved via digitalization and smart wagon concepts including digital automated couplers bridging electricity/energy to the assets. This means possibilities to install equipment such as sensors on the wagons/assets and in return one will receive information of its position, goods condition, but also enables predictive maintenance applications. All these improvements with its requirements are taken care of in a first approach in FR8RAIL for further exploration in other innovation programme 5 projects e.g. FR8RAIL II and FR8RAIL III-IV.

The aim is to prepare for taking the innovations to technical demonstrations and that will be the ultimate goal/result mainly in FR8RAIL IV where for example smart wagons with digital automated couplers and new generation of running gear will be run in strategical demonstrations both in Sweden and Germany.

The impact will mainly be an increased market share in connection to the political will declared in the White Paper and environmental improvements. Furthermore, with the new smart wagon concept also the societal needs for a less noise issues in connection to railway can be avoid. With a more efficient railway one can expect less congestion on the roads and a lot of productive time will be released among with less emissions.

Work performed from the beginning of the project to the end of the period covered by the report and main results achieved so far

The work in FR8RAIL builds on the common vision for IP5.

WP1 Business, Analytics, KPIs, Top Level Requirements
Analysis of requirements to reach competitiveness and values for societal needs, business analysis delivered.
Finalized work on high-level specifications for wagon and propulsion
KPI development and refinement for the freight rail sector together with project IMPACT II.

WP2 Condition based and predictive maintenance
The CBM project approach and user cases have been detailed and data gathering among with analysis for a new maintenance regime taken place.
4-step maturity model to reach an overall condition based and predictive maintenance program developed
Design of the CBM architecture and processes to execute new condition based and predictive maintenance program.
Data analysis of maintenance data and sensor data regarding key components and determination of variables for components along with maintenance program for specific components.

WP3 Telematics & electrification
State of art analysis and collection of industry and rail sector requirements completed as well as defined requirements of wOBU positioning function, positioning algorithms developed, and reference scenarios selected and performed.
Coordination with complementary project INNOWAG regarding cargo monitoring - and its interface to wOBU (wagon onboard unit).
Following studies have been carried out; Requirement Analysis and Technologies evaluation for train’s wireless backbone. Detailed Specification of train’s wireless backbone infrastructure. Safety Analysis. Algorithms for positioning rail freight trains. “Technologies for wagon monitoring systems”. Wayside condition monitoring impact analysis. Specification of data model for application interface of CMS.

WP4 Running Gear, Core and Extended market wagon
State of the art elaborated and wagon envelope and concept of test-bench for acoustic analysis developed
Core market wagon and bogie selected as final concepts and detailed analysis towards Y25 bogie family carried out. 3D analysis for wagon and bogie carried out. Modular concept for extended market wagon completed.
Concepts be benchmarked on track friendliness and running gear approaches towards low noise, track friendliness have advanced. Integrations towards WP3 and WP5 have taken place. The 5L concept have been integrated in the work for both extended wagon, running gear and core market wagon.
The smart wagon concepts were presented at Innotrans 2018 and will be followed up by digital automated couplers (DAC) in Innotrans 2020. In this field also connection to the telematics functions are planned.

WP5 Automated Coupling
Version of the technical specifications developed.
Development of the coupler head design and wagon interfaces delivered.
CBA and migration plan to introduce automatic couplers finalized.
Alignment with operators’ group and TIS has taken place and common approaches identified with regards to migration.

WP6 High Level System architecture & Integration
Work on alignment activities have taken place in a new TMT structure within IP5 level and examples of technical integration are connecting all WPs especially WP3 and WP5 towards WP4.
IT architecture with focus on automated transports has been delivered in the end of FR8RAIL project.

The FR8RAIL final conference took place in collaboration with Smartrail conference in Munich 2019. At this event also the complementary projects (not at least INNOWAG, FFL4E, ARCC and FR8HUB) was participating.

Progress beyond the state of the art and expected potential impact (including the socio-economic impact and the wider societal implications of the project so far)

With market analysis and high level requirements as a base FR8RAIL have paved the way to following areas of innovation.
"Defined condition based and predictive maintenance approach and use cases, analysed top components and feedings.
Integrated features in the freight wagon such as telematics and automated couplers.
Development of positioning algorithms for the wagons and low cost receivers and advanced parameter studies for monitoring of wheel profiles based on on-board sensors
Identification of suitable sensor systems for noise and vibration monitoring, testing is ongoing and to be finalized in FR8RAIL II.
Development and selection of wagon concept, bogie and wagon concept are being modeled for further detailing and assessment enabling running gear with low noice and trackfriendliness. Modular approach is also one study.
Based on existing SA5 coupler a new version of automated coupler is under development with enhanced functionality aligned with the IP5 vision for the future automation. Introducing automated couplers for freight gives opportunity to higher degree of automation and safety values."

Vision for future Freight