Rail4Future: The digital railway system
By the year 2050, CO2 emissions in the transport sector are to be reduced by 90 percent (compared to the reference year 1990). This is a central goal of the "European Green Deal". On the way to sustainable mobility, rail transport plays a decisive role as one of the most environmentally friendly and energy-efficient means of transport. In Austria alone, ÖBB transported a total of around 287 million rail customers and over 95 million tonnes of goods to their destinations in a climate-friendly manner in 2020.
Major challenges
In order to be able to exploit its full potential as a mobility and logistics service provider in the future, ÖBB has to master a number of challenges. For example, higher capacities have to be made available, which means more wear and tear on all components in the track when using the existing railway infrastructure facilities. At the same time, the overall costs for the provision of the infrastructure, i.e. for measures in new construction as well as in reconstruction and maintenance, are to be reduced. It is also necessary to maximise the resilience of the railway system with regard to environmental influences. Since weather-related disruptions to rail operations are constantly increasing, considerable investments in technical protective measures and new transport concepts are required to make the entire infrastructure fit for climate change.
Necessary research
Important questions in this context concern the ageing behaviour and thus the planning and implementation of measures for the basic infrastructure such as rail, sleeper, ballast bed, bridges and tunnels. Analytical approaches, numerical methods and tools already exist in some cases for a life cycle analysis and the assessment of the condition and behaviour of facilities. However, these usually deal with a single facility and focus on a specific aspect or a single component. Understanding the interactions in the system requires additional fundamental research to gain deeper insights into the complex physical phenomena that occur in rail transport.
About Rail4Future
The future of efficient use and management of railway resources lies in a fully networked and digitised railway system. ÖBB is working on the realisation of this highly complex research task with around 20 partners from industry and science.
Rail4Future: The digital railway system
By the year 2050, CO2 emissions in the transport sector are to be reduced by 90 percent (compared to the reference year 1990). This is a central goal of the "European Green Deal". On the way to sustainable mobility, rail transport plays a decisive role as one of the most environmentally friendly and energy-efficient means of transport. In Austria alone, ÖBB transported a total of around 287 million rail customers and over 95 million tonnes of goods to their destinations in a climate-friendly manner in 2020.
Major challenges
In order to be able to exploit its full potential as a mobility and logistics service provider in the future, ÖBB has to master a number of challenges. For example, higher capacities have to be made available, which means more wear and tear on all components in the track when using the existing railway infrastructure facilities. At the same time, the overall costs for the provision of the infrastructure, i.e. for measures in new construction as well as in reconstruction and maintenance, are to be reduced. It is also necessary to maximise the resilience of the railway system with regard to environmental influences. Since weather-related disruptions to rail operations are constantly increasing, considerable investments in technical protective measures and new transport concepts are required to make the entire infrastructure fit for climate change.
Necessary research
Important questions in this context concern the ageing behaviour and thus the planning and implementation of measures for the basic infrastructure such as rail, sleeper, ballast bed, bridges and tunnels. Analytical approaches, numerical methods and tools already exist in some cases for a life cycle analysis and the assessment of the condition and behaviour of facilities. However, these usually deal with a single facility and focus on a specific aspect or a single component. Understanding the interactions in the system requires additional fundamental research to gain deeper insights into the complex physical phenomena that occur in rail transport.
Digital twin
"The future of efficient use and management of railway resources lies in a fully networked and digitised railway system," says Thomas Petraschek in this regard. The Head of Research & Development at ÖBB is responsible for leading a multidisciplinary consortium in which railway operators, industry, scientific partners and universities pool their expertise and field data within the framework of "Rail4Future". The partners of the COMET project "Railways for Future - Resilient Digital Railway Systems to Enhance Performance" have set themselves the goal of designing the digital railway system of the future. "To this end, a novel, high-performance and completely virtual validation platform for simulations of entire railway lines is being developed," Petraschek outlines the highly complex research task. By interweaving data from a wide variety of sources and using new types of calculation models and modelling techniques, the aim is to create a digital image of sections of track, a so-called digital twin.
Basis for innovations
The declared aim of the research project is to evaluate the dynamic behaviour and condition of components such as rails or switches and the long-term trends of railway engineering structures such as bridges or tunnels. "The research results can ensure a continuous flow of reliable and meaningful information - and this over the entire life cycle of the various railway infrastructure components and interacting rail vehicles - starting from the planning, production and construction phase through to operation and degradation," says Petraschek, who expects Rail4Future to provide a deep basic understanding and description of the overall railway system. The analysis of the effects of new operating scenarios (e.g. capacity increase, environmental conditions) as well as the virtual evaluation of new types of components and rail vehicles while minimising on-track tests should form the basis for decisive innovation steps in the railway system.
On the one hand, this will make it possible to optimise the provision of existing equipment over its entire service life, as the timely detection or prediction of the occurrence of wear and mechanical damage helps to increase the reliability and safety of railway operations. On the other hand, the simulations with the Digital System Twin will make it possible to significantly shorten the innovation cycles of new products or solutions.
The consortium
About 20 project partners from science and industry are working within the framework of Rail4Future (project duration: April 2021 to September 2024) to use simulations to enable analyses for a more reliable and cost-effective evaluation of system conditions, system behaviour and the effects of measures.