Project description
Advanced technologies put transport on track
From the first to the last mile of any long-distance journey, the concept of interoperability framework (IF) plays a central role in the Shift2Rail Innovation Programme (IP) 4. The programme encourages focused research and innovation and market-driven solutions aiming to transform advanced technologies into innovative rail products. Several Shift2Rail-related projects have been developed or are under development to extend a set of central concepts and technologies contained in the IF. The EU-funded SPRINT project will focus on central aspects of the Shift2Rail IF and improve the market knowledge of the multimodal transport system. The project will study the specific challenges highlighted by the research. It will improve IF performance and scalability, simplifying and automating all the required steps for new services and subsystems integration, determining a reference design for the Shift2Rail IF, and demonstrating the proposals for IF improvement.
Objective
The concept of Interoperability Framework (IF) is at the core of the Shift2Rail Innovation Programme (IP) 4, and it is the key concept for facilitating a seamless travel experience for users across borders and modes. The IF enables the technical interoperability of heterogeneous, multimodal transport-related services by relieving applications from the task of locating, harmonizing and understanding multiple and independent data and event sources, services, etc.
A series of past and ongoing projects related to Shift2Rail IP4 (IT2Rail, ST4RT, GOF4R, CONNECTIVE) have developed and are refining and extending a set of core concepts and technologies that are part of the IF.
The Semantics for PerfoRmant and scalable INteroperability of multimodal Transport (SPRINT) project will improve key aspects of the Shift2Rail IF to bring the market uptake of the multimodal transport ecosystem envisioned by IP4 closer to reality. In particular, the project will address the following specific challenges posed by the objectives of TD4.1 objectives and explicitly addressed by the S2R-OC-IP4-01-2018 call:
• Improve IF performance and scalability to sustain a large deployment.
• Simplify/automate all the necessary steps needed to integrate new services and sub-systems in the IP4 ecosystem.
To this end, the project will:
• Define a reference architecture for the Shift2Rail IF, which will take into account recent advances in the design and development of distributed systems, and in particular of cloud-based ones.
• Define techniques facilitating – in particular by increasing their level of automation –activities that are central to the concept of IF, such as the collaborative creation and management of ontologies and of semantic-based mappings between heterogeneous data representations.
• Demonstrate the proposed improvements to the IF through a proof-of-concept implementation that will reach at least TRL 4.
Fields of science
Programme(s)
Funding Scheme
Shift2Rail-RIA - Research and Innovation actionCoordinator
1050 Bruxelles / Brussel
Belgium
The organization defined itself as SME (small and medium-sized enterprise) at the time the Grant Agreement was signed.