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Report

Teaser, summary, work performed and final results

Periodic Reporting for period 1 - IN2DREAMS (INtelligent solutions 2ward the Development of Railway Energy and Asset Management Systems in Europe)

Teaser

Summary

The predicted growth of transport, especially in European railway infrastructures, is expected to introduce a dramatic increase in freight and passenger services by the end of 2050. To support sustainable development of these infrastructures, novel data-driven ICT solutions are required. These will enable monitoring, analysis and exploitation of energy and asset information for the entire railway system including power grid, stations, rolling stock and infrastructure. IN2DREAMS (INtelligent solutions 2ward the Development of Railway Energy and Asset Management Systems in Europe) will address these challenges through two distinct work streams: Work Stream 1 (WS1), focusing on the management of energy-related data and Work Stream 2 (WS2), focusing on the management of asset-related data.

IN2DREAMS will develop and demonstrate a modular cloud-based open data management platform (ODM) facilitating ubiquitous support of both energy and asset services. WS1 will provide energy metering services through a dynamically reconfigurable platform offering improved reliability, ease of monitoring and on-the-fly optimisation for the entire railway system. This will include a heterogeneous secure and resilient telecommunication platform comprising both wireless and wireline technologies converging energy and telecom services. This infrastructure will interconnect a plethora of monitoring devices and end-users to the railway control centre and will include an ODM platform for data collection, aggregation and analysis, able to scale with the railway operatorsâ€™ needs. This platform will be non-intrusive exploiting advanced signal processing and intelligent learning algorithms.

Within WS2, IN2DREAMS will concentrate on defining IT solutions and methodologies for business-secure decision support in the field of data processing and analytics for railway asset management. The general aim is to study and proof the application of smart contracts in the railway ecosystems, by addressing also legal and regulatory implications, and advanced visual and rule-based data analytics, including metrics for performance assessment.

Work performed

The consortium has achieved the following so far:
-Developed a global architecture that takes a holistic view of the heterogeneous platform and jointly considers all technology domains
-Offered a tightly integrated energy/communication platform extending the smart grid concept to the railway sector and enabling smart metering for both energy and asset management. To support this activity, a set of multi-protocol interfaces have been developed
-Relied on an open control and management framework to support cross-domain infrastructure slicing
-Provided synchronized measurements for both on-board and trackside across heterogeneous wireless/optical/packet transport networks
-Built a functional system of real-time monitoring in charge of gathering the data from sensors, and use the network infrastructure to send this data to a Data Management platform. Built, deployed and put in production a complete IOT architecture
-Launched a Data Management Platform
-Modified sensors into Reims Tramway substation
-Designed Monitoring On Board Rugged Gateway (ALOHA) has been designed and build. The first installation and security test on Reims Tramway has successfully passed
-Identified the data transactions scenarios and the main business cases and defined the smart contracts reference architecture for the data transactions, figuring out all the technical and business aspects and also defining the acceptance criteria for the data exchange framework. The main outcome is a set of four identified scenarios that have the set of features needed to benefit from the implementation of smart contracts on a Distributed Ledger Technology network. The selected scenario has been further analysed to derive requirements and features that the PoC must implement. As a side activity, a first study of the legal implementation related to the employment of smart contracts was prepared. Its outcomes were taken into consideration for the selection of the best scenario for the PoC implementation
-Studied, designed and developed data analytics solutions for knowledge extraction from railway asset data. In particular the first year has focused on the definition of several scenarios as use-cases for the work to be conducted during the subsequent tasks. A total of seven scenarios have been identified. The objective to design knowledge information methodology from raw data has been completed; and the objective to provide energy portfolio analytics useful for decision making has been achieved at 70%
-Provided the analytics infrastructure that complements the data storage facility.

Final results

\"The design of future railway systems will be centred around the concepts of smart metering and asset management, whereby all sections of the system, from energy production all the way to the end users and railway assets will be continuously monitored, controlled and optimized by a powerful 2-way ICT network. This trend is in alignment with the Shift2Rail JUâ€™s Multi-Annual Action Plan and its associated targets for 50% reduction in LCC and has opened the road for a greener and more efficient future for the railway sector, the European Society and beyond. The deployment of smart metering and asset management requires significant investments and R&D efforts in â€œintelligent\"\" railway network infrastructure â€“ both hardware and software â€“ to support: a) the target for 100% capacity increase through the development of enhanced predictive maintenance and intelligent asset monitoring technologies; b) a well-functioning energy services market with specific interfaces for the railway industry, which gives real choices for energy savings and efficiency and, c) new types of demand, for large and small stations.

Despite the recent surge in research and standardization activities in these domains, the quest for an optimal ICT solution that can jointly serve smart metering and asset management applications in the railway sector, remains an open issue. As a result, railway operators lack sufficient benchmarking regarding the identification of the solution that best fits their service needs. Moreover, current solutions lack the degree of flexibility/resilience required to make the network adapt itself for optimal performance/power consumption for any given combination of operational conditions and service requirements. The lack of sufficient resilience and redundancies in the ICT part of the smart metering system limits its ability to maintain acceptable operation particularly under critical/emergency conditions (i.e. when it is most needed) and to deploy services such as dynamic pricing that could greatly benefit end users.

The proposal for a flexible and resilient ICT infrastructure, that optimally re-configures itself as needed from a performance, energy efficiency and cost point perspective, is the core aspiration of the IN2DREAMS consortium. This architecture will address some important challenges that the railway sector faces today, as mentioned above, leading to a more cost-efficient, greener, safer and with higher capacity railway systemâ€“ generating positive impact for all involved stakeholders spanning from railway infrastructure mangers and power grid providers to end users and the society as a whole.\"