The project PLASA-2 is part of the cross-cutting activities of the Shift2Rail program. It is the continuation of the activities started in the project PLASA. It consists of two sub-projects:
- Smart Planning
- Virtual Certification
Smart Planning
The Smart Planning sub-project aims at facilitating planning activities of various stakeholders in the railway system, making the effects of planning decisions on large, complex railway networks measurable and predictable.
was developed that allows to predict the impact of the timetable and infrastructure restrictions (such as construction sites) on expected punctuality on large railway networks. The tool can be applied for short and midterm timetable planning in order to identify potentially critical situations in the plan. It provides results within a few minutes of simulation runtime.
Within the project the simulation tool PROTON (Punctuality and Railway Operation Simulation) is developed. The tool is meant to improve the planning quality of timetables by giving infrastructure managers and railway undertakings the means to predict the expected operational quality of the planned timetables on a given infrastructure. The tool can be applied for short- and mid-term timetable planning in order to identify potentially critical situations in the plan and provides results within a few minutes of simulation runtime, thus allowing planners to optimally use the existing infrastructure capacity. This is particularly relevant when railway infrastructure is extended to address the challenges of climate change, which in turn inevitably reduces the capacity of the existing infrastructure due to construction sites. The tool will be applied by DB and TRV. Further, it will be used for freight traffic simulations within the S2R project FR8RAIL-3.
Virtual Certification
The sub project Virtual Certification aims to provide recommendations for a mixed virtual/experimental authorisation process.
Virtual Testing in general is the use of simulations, HiL (Hardware in the Loop) and SiL (Software in the Loop) test rigs or a combination of them and can be used instead of or in combination with field tests in the approval process. Virtual tests need to be verified and validated. The verification and validation process, in this context, is always based on a comparison to a reference object, which could be the real physical equivalent or a so-called benchmark object. In order to assess this comparison and to determine if the model is a valid representation of the real system, specific acceptance criteria, which differ greatly in the reviewed fields, need to be fulfilled. It is shown that variability and uncertainties as they exist in the real world, need to be sufficiently considered in a simulation procedure.
The result of the project is a generic framework for a mixed virtual/experimental authorisation process, which shall ultimately lead to a significant reduction of authorisation costs and duration. The generic approach will be handed over to relevant active working groups of CEN and CENELEC.
