Digitalization and Automation of Freight Rail (FR8RAIL-2) (RV39)

Project Coordinator - Bombardier Transportation GmbH

Project Leader at KTH - Sebastian Stichel

Scientists at KTH - Mats Berg, Carlos Casanueva Perez, Saeed Hossein Nia, Visakh V Krishna

Other Scientists - From 18 European Partners

FR8RAIL-2 focuses on improving the freight eco system by addressing various challenges: Automatic couplers, provided with electrical and data transmission functionalities will massively improve the efficiency of the train composition process, new telematics and electrification will enable Condition Based Maintenance (CBM), improved methods for annual and short-term timetable planning will help traffic operators increasing the overall capacity and raise punctuality, future freight wagon design is a stream that will contribute in improving reliability of the freight transport while increasing the payload per metre of train. The latter one will be propelled by future mainline electric freight locomotives featuring highly flexible freight propulsion systems with reduced operational costs. Furthermore, these new freight trains will be propelled by more than one locomotive running with distributed power, thus allowing long freight trains up to 1500 m. Last but not least, focus is given to driver advisory systems that are connected (C-DAS) to the traffic management systems, further enhancing capacity, improving punctuality and optimize energy consumption of the railway system. 

In FR8RAIL-2 for KTH the activities that started in the first phase of the project continue (see above). In 2019 also work on a new methodology to predict wheel wear and RCF with help of machine learning techniques has been started. Since the simulation times for wear and RCF prediction are drastically reduced, this new methodology can be used to optimize wheel profiles also with respect to the long-term behaviour. This is up to now not possible because of the long simulation times.

V. Krishna, S. Hossein-Nia and S. Stichel. New methodology to estimate costs caused by rail wear and RCF depending on the type of running gear. Proceedings of the 26th International Conference on Dynamics of Vehicles on Roads and Tracks, IAVSD, Gothenburg, Sweden, August 2019.