The European railway network has been incrementally developed over many years and currently consists of a patchwork of components, systems and discrete incremental technical improvements. Due to this legacy the network is prone to performance issues. Asset maintenance activities historically follow costly time-based regimes, whilst train movement management and the link to asset management is distributed over a wide range of information systems. Traction power systems incur high distribution energy losses and no control systems exist to balance energy demands and ensure integrity of supply.
It has been predicted that there will be unprecedented future demand for growth in rail transportation. I2R sets the foundations for a resilient, cost-efficient, high capacity European network by delivering important building blocks that unlock the innovation potential that exist in S2R. The I2R overall objectives are to make advances towards achieving the global S2R objectives of capacity, reliability and life cycle costing.
This is being achieved by the adoption of a whole system approach. I2R contains three core sub-projects that link together infrastructure re-design and associated asset maintenance, with rail traffic control and traction energy management.
Due to the complexity of the project specific emphasis has been placed on creating governance processes, analytical methodologies and technical frameworks that both stimulated innovation and aided integrated system designs. These processes have been successfully implemented and duly evidenced by the positive technical progress achieved within all work packages.
The work programmes have specifically addressed incremental improvements to existing systems in acknowledgment that it is possible to achieve valuable improvements from relatively small interventions focussed on solutions for known significant failure modes.
Other aspects of the project have been orientated towards more radical change and have pursued new solutions that offer a potential for step-change of design/production methods. New tools to manage innovation, systems integration and “Value Engineering” principles have been developed.
System performance has been considered from the perspective of adopting condition- and/or risk-based maintenance strategies and has resulted in the production of an asset management framework supporting dynamic track maintenance models.
Strong emphasis has been given to a data-centric based philosophy that will represent the fundamentals of train movement operational control; and any infrastructure changes have considered the application of low cost sensors that enable these maintenance and train planning models to function in real time.
The functional requirements specifications for the train management system short/long term forecasting has been completed, and form the concept definition of the “Systems Integration Layer” that is the central applications kernel. In recognition that energy demands are likely to increase significant progress has been made in producing design models that reflect more accurately the energy flows within the traction power system and consider public grid connection interface requirements and progression towards a digital sub-station concept using IEC 61850 principles.
