Development of a new automatic Track Warning System to improve safety conditions for railway workers
Last Updated: 31/10/2022 16:07 Created at: 31/10/2022 15:48
Final Presentation of NAVISP Project EL2-077 now available:
On Tuesday, October 25, 2022, Si Consulting, presented the results of the NAVISP project “Safety Enhancement for Maintenance of Railway Operations (SEMOR).” About 30 people from industry and research followed the interesting presentation and the subsequent interactive Q&A session.
SI Consulting is an Italian engineering company, whose core business is to provide solutions for the railroad market, from monitoring equipment for rail transport to software solutions for risk analysis, traffic, and energy supply. Together with its consortium partners RFI SpA, Level and GTEer, Si Consulting has succeeded in developing a worksite protection system that monitors the safety of workers on railway construction sites, thereby increasing worker safety while reducing train delays caused by the limitations of the process based on current automatic train warning systems (ATWS).
Initial requirements for the proposed new system included among others visualisation of the safe/unsafe position of workers on the screen of a device assigned to the work area supervisor, real-time location of each operator, verification that all workers are individually in a safe position, and the ability for the working site manager to allow the train to pass, as well as the ability to interface the device directly with ATWS or signalling systems.
In order to fulfil these requirements, the developed system consists of individual positioning devices, including GNSS receivers and IMUs, as well as a master PC/tablet capable of visualising the positions of the individual positioning devices and communicating the safe/unsafe status with the ATWS and signalling systems. As the SEMOR positioning system requires high accuracy, continuity and integrity, it features the integration of different positioning techniques (RTK and PPP) and sensors (IMU), as well as different constellations. This is to guarantee the avoidance of unpredictable positioning errors and to pave the way towards railways safety standards.
At the end of the project phase, the consortium was able to develop an advanced prototype that needs to be certified in a future step to allow the integration of the product in the Italian market. In addition, the current prototype is to be further developed within the framework of a new NAVISP project called SEMOR3D to improve the integrity requirements (to eventually reach SIL4 in a commercial solution) and also to cover difficult scenarios such as mountain canyons, tunnels, and railway stations by using drones to enable the creation of 3D area models. During the Q&A, the integration of geofencing applications was also discussed as a possible further development of SEMOR.
The project was part of NAVISP Element 2, which aims to foster innovation and maintain and improve the capabilities and competitiveness of the participating States' industry in the global market for satellite navigation and, more broadly, PNT technologies and services.
More detailed information can be found in the slides of the Final Presentation.