109 - 5G Localisation for Safety of Life Applications in Rail

109 - 5G Localisation for Safety of Life Applications in Rail

DESCRIPTION

Safe Localisation of railway vehicles is necessary to allow train control systems to operate. Today this is done within the European Train Control System (ETCS) by using fixed location tags called Eurobalises and odometry sensors.

While Eurobalises typically are safe, fairly accurate and robust, they impose high costs for installation and maintenance on the infrastructure operator and only provide positions at discrete locations. Odometry systems are often inaccurate and not robust enough in challenging environments. 

These challenges make it necessary to establish new methods for train localization. In the past the main focus has been on GNSS based solutions, which offer great potential for rail applications. However, these solutions often lack robustness to environmental effects and resilience to jamming, spoofing and cyberattacks to ensure the necessary level of safety to be used in train control applications. 

Since the current rail mobile communication network GSM-R nears its end of life, railway operators invest heavily in the 5G based Future Railway Mobile Communication System (FRMCS). This opens the opportunity to use FRMCS, in combination, if required, with other components and features of the 5G signal, as an alternative means for absolute and relative positioning. 

 

The objective of this activity is to analyse if 5G / FRMCS based positioning could be an alternative and complementary source of PNT for safety critical rail applications. To do this positioning solutions using the public 5G networks are to be tested in the rail environment. 

 

The tasks to be performed shall include:

  • Critical review of the capabilities of FRMCS and other 5G associated positioning protocols
  • Specification of requirements and test cases, based on railway user needs, for a 5G / FRMCS based positioning solution
  • Development of a prototype that is able to compute relative and/or absolute range estimates from 'all in view' multi-band 5G/FRMCS network infrastructure
  • Testing of the protype in the rail environment, including recording of a high accuracy reference data set for comparison (ground truth)
  • Analysis of the positioning performance against the ground truth data set. 


 

The main outputs of the activity will consist of:

  • Hardware and Software Design of a 5G localization prototype for train localization
     
  • Test dataset including ground truth data
  • Performance and Availability analysis in the rail environment, clustering of results based on environmental conditions.