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The next generation of railway crossing asset management technology

Project description

New tech for railway crossing management

Railway crossings degrade quickly, typically lasting less than five years, despite being designed for 15. This deterioration leads to significant unplanned maintenance costs and delays, which could be avoided with better management. The EU-funded XCROSS project aims to develop innovative technologies for monitoring, inspecting, and maintaining crossing surface profiles. These technologies will include new inspection techniques utilising 3D laser scanning and computer vision, digital twins of the crossing with advanced calculation algorithms, and the development of augmented reality and 3D printing techniques for on-site maintenance. Additionally, the project will establish an early warning system to detect initial signs of degradation and trigger the maintenance process.

Objective

Railway crossings degrade significantly faster than plain line track, with lifespans commonly lasting less than 5 years despite their design lives typically being 15 years. This results in Billions of Euros being spent on unplanned corrective maintenance, crossing renewals and delay-minutes, which would not occur if they could be better managed to reach their design lives.
XCROSS will develop a suite of integrated disruptive technologies which combine to provide a technological process for the monitoring, inspection, and maintenance intervention of crossing surface profiles. To achieve the objectives, new crossing inspection techniques will be developed using 3D laser scanning technology and computer vision to allow for fast, repeatable and high accuracy crossing measurement. These 3D scans will then be used to create digital twins (DT) of the crossing, embedded with advanced wheel-rail interaction calculation algorithms. Considering these wheel forces and also on-site practical maintenance constraints, the digital twin will use optimisation strategies to calculate the optimal geometry profile achievable via on-site welding and grinding techniques in terms of lifecycle cost. Then, to enable practical implementation of the calculated optimum crossing profile geometries, Augmented Reality (AR) and 3D printing techniques will be developed to provide visualisation guides for on-site welding and grinding. These technologies will allow the maintenance engineers to see their welding and grinding progress ‘live’, and thus be an enabler for a step-change in the quality control of crossing interventions. Lastly, an early warning system will also be developed to act as the initial trigger for the deployment of the 3D scanning, AR and 3D printing. It is vital for detecting the early signs of degradation and thus initiating the deployment of the new maintenance process before the onset of irreparable degradation.

Fields of science (EuroSciVoc)

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Keywords

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Programme(s)

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Topic(s)

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Funding Scheme

Funding scheme (or “Type of Action”) inside a programme with common features. It specifies: the scope of what is funded; the reimbursement rate; specific evaluation criteria to qualify for funding; and the use of simplified forms of costs like lump sums.

HORIZON-JU-RIA - HORIZON JU Research and Innovation Actions

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Call for proposal

Procedure for inviting applicants to submit project proposals, with the aim of receiving EU funding.

(opens in new window) HORIZON-JU-ER-2023-01

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Coordinator

TECHNISCHE UNIVERSITEIT DELFT
Net EU contribution

Net EU financial contribution. The sum of money that the participant receives, deducted by the EU contribution to its linked third party. It considers the distribution of the EU financial contribution between direct beneficiaries of the project and other types of participants, like third-party participants.

€ 575 870,63
Total cost

The total costs incurred by this organisation to participate in the project, including direct and indirect costs. This amount is a subset of the overall project budget.

No data

Participants (8)

Partners (1)

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