Assets4Rail is a 30 months Shift2Rail project which will contribute to the modal shift to rail by exploring, adapting and testing cutting-edge technologies for railway asset monitoring and maintenance.
Assets4Rail shares the Shift2Rail view of having an ageing European railway infrastructure that needs to cope with the expected increased traffic in the future. To achieve this, weneed an improvement in technology and a cost-effective maintenance and intervention system for infrastructure inspection and monitoring.
Assets4Rail aims to contribute to the modal shift by exploring, adapting and testing cutting-edge technologies for railway asset monitoring and maintenance. To achieve that, Assets4Rail follows a twofold approach, including infrastructure (tunnel, bridges, track geometry, and safety systems) and vehicles. A dedicated information model (BIM) will be the keystone of the infrastructure part of the project. This modelwith integrated algorithms will gather and analyze the information collected by specific sensors which will monitor subsurface tunnel defects, fatigue consumption, noise and vibrations of bridges as well as track geometry. On the other hand, train monitoring will include the installation of track-side and underframe imaging automated system to collect data for detecting specific types of defects that have non-negligible impacts on infrastructure. The additional use of the RFID technology will enable the smooth identification of trains and single elements, associated with the identified rolling stock failures.
The main objective for the project is to developing a set of cost efficient and cutting-edge asset-specific measuring and monitoring devices. These will collect and deliver the status data of the railway system (infrastructure and rolling stock). The information collected by such devices will then be processed to generate relevant maintenance infrastructure-related information to support asset management decisions