A selection of research projects involving UIC was presented at this year’s Transport Research Arena (TRA) in Warsaw, Poland.

For more information about TRA, please read our 26 April edition of UIC eNews which covers the event:

http://uic.org/com/uic-e-news/495/

RESTRAIL project (ended 2014) – Overview

RESTRAIL (REduction of Suicides and Trespasses on RAILway property; 2011-2014) was a three-year EU FP7 collaborative project coordinated by the International Union of Railway’s Security Division which aimed to reduce railway suicides and trespassing fatalities as well as the costly service disruption caused by these events.

The project benefited from multi-disciplinary expertise provided by a consortium of 17 partners from 12 countries (Belgium, Finland, France, Germany, Italy, Israel, the Netherlands, Poland, Spain, Sweden, Turkey and the United Kingdom). The project started in October 2011 and ended in September 2014 and provided the rail industry and researchers worldwide with an analysis of the most cost-effective measures to reduce the frequency and impact of suicide- and trespass-related incidents.

RESTRAIL toolbox

The RESTRAIL toolbox is a problem-solving guide for implementation of measures to prevent railway suicides and trespassing accidents and to mitigate the post incident consequences. It is the main output of the RESTRAIL research project and it aims to be a helpful, intuitive and user-friendly tool. It summarises practical information collected and produced during the project (synthesis, guidelines, best practice, lessons learned and empirical evidence for effectiveness). The content also makes links with scientific publications which support the recommended measures, providing a wide list of references (research papers, research reports, reviews, etc.).

The toolbox was designed as an online guide to best practice which is easy to disseminate, find, access and update even after the end of the project. Besides the online version, which is openly available at www.restrail.eu/toolbox, a synthesis of the toolbox was published in the final RESTRAIL official document (Bonneau and Havârneanu, 2014) publicly available for download on the project’s webpage.

The Restrail project was one of the four concluded research projects selected by the European Commission to be presented on the EC stand as a success story during the conference.

• For further information about RESTRAIL please contact our UIC experts:

Marie-Hélène Bonneau, bonneau at uic.org or Grigore Havârneanu, havarneanu at uic.org

CAPACITY4RAIL project (end 2017) – Overview

Towards an affordable, resilient, innovative and high-capacity European Railway System for 2030/2050

To face the future challenge of increasing traffic and making the railway system more attractive and competitive, a step change is needed to guarantee an adaptable system, offering a high operational capacity with high reliability and resilience to hazards.

This step change will only be achieved through a global and combined optimisation of infrastructure, operation and vehicle performances.

Paving the way for the specification of future railway technologies and systems and bringing together the major stakeholders of industry, infrastructure managers, railway undertakings, engineering and academic sciences, CAPACITY4RAIL will contribute to the development of guidance documents identifying further actions to be taken and the future technologies and systems to be developed.

The UIC-coordinated project will demonstrate that step change in railway infrastructure and operations may be achieved within the constraints of the need to maintain railway services while the work is being performed.

• For further information about CAPACITY4RAIL please contact our UIC expert:

Laurent Schmitt, schmitt at uic.org

• Or visit http://www.capacity4rail.eu

BODEGA project (end 2018) – Overview

BODEGA is a three-year research project co-funded by the European Commission within the EU Framework Programme for Research and Innovation - Horizon 2020 under the topic BES-14-2014: Ethical Societal Dimension, Human factors in border control – Proactive Enhancement of Human Performance in Border Control.

The project started on 1 June 2015 and is coordinated by VTT (Technical Research Centre of Finland) with a consortium consisting of 15 partners from seven European countries: VTT, CEA, AIT, Thales, UIC – International Union of Railways, CEIS, University of Namur, ATOS, Zanasi & Partners Ubium, Happywise, Hellenic Border Guard, Finnish Border Guard – RAJA, ADM.

The aim of the project is to build expertise at the European level about Human Factors at border lines in a way to enhance its efficiency without side effects to the end users (border control agents and managers and land, air and maritime travellers).

This project is important for the rail sector since it will contribute to improve the efficiency and attractiveness of rail transport by facilitating the flow of regular travellers and speeding up border crossing for regular travel saving time for these travellers. For this reason the UIC Security Division decided to attend the consortium to represent the interests of the railway companies within the organisation of the border controls at railway border points.

The main objectives of BODEGA’s project are to:

• Develop a round approach to incorporate ethical, societal and legal considerations into the set of human, organizational and technical factors to support the effectiveness of EU border control from different perspectives.
• Construct a greater understanding of border guard’s work and border control by adopting a long-term perspective and taking into account different end-users’ needs and requirements for future Smart Borders, e.g. border guards, border control authorities, and passengers (regular travellers).
• Gather new knowledge about psychological factors, which might affect border control efficiency and effectiveness at all border types: land (both road and rail), sea and air by performing in-depth human factors analysis.
• Co-design and develop new guidelines, recommendations and specifications, based on refined understanding of the border control task allocation between human and machine.
• Develop and validate a toolbox with novel methods and methodologies: a set of practical tools for empowering border guards in their work for better EU border control efficiency, security and effectiveness, work-related well-being and job satisfaction, as well as improved decision-making by border control authorities, faster and positive border crossing experience of passengers.
• Border control is a complex and security-critical environment. To achieve its objectives, BODEGA will adopt an authentic co-design/multi-stakeholder approach to build new concepts, practices and structures for all types of borders in EU. BODEGA has built a multi-disciplinary consortium including experts in Human and Organisational Factors in complex systems and specialists in cognitive ergonomics, representative end-users and experts in smart borders systems engineering.

BODEGA has made the strong choice to include several important end-users, each of them being representative of the different types of border crossing which can be met in Europe: railway borders out of the Schengen area, maritime borders and their specificity in detection of goods, road borders and air borders in the Schengen area.Retour ligne automatique

Within this framework, the role of the UIC Security Division will be to:

• Represent the railways in the management of the constraints related to border control in order to reinforce the relationship between border guards and railway staff, facilitate the control operations for improving the efficiency of rail transport,
• Implement railway field studies for defining concrete guidelines to be implemented,
• Disseminate the results to the members in order to enable them to develop the right solutions at minimum cost and to have coherence between them.

• For further information about BODEGA please contact our UIC expert:

Virginie Papillault, papillault at uic.org

• Or visit http://www.bodega-project.eu

Graffolution project (ended Feb 2016) – Overview

Graffolution (Awareness and prevention solutions against graffiti vandalism in public areas and transport) was an EU FP7 Project (No. 608152) focusing on ‘smart responses’, multi-directional awareness and positive solutions for the wider public – including both those who are in charge of managing graffiti vandalism as well as those who construe street art as part of city regeneration, place making, creative or community action.

As a partner of Graffolution, UIC participated in the project kick-off meeting from 7 – 8 April 2014 in Vienna. Using an innovative web-based platform, Graffolution aims at comprehensively understanding the marked increase of illegal graffiti across Europe by focusing on smart awareness and prevention solutions for all affected stakeholder groups.

UIC was involved in several key components of the project including the collection of graffiti prevention initiatives and best practice across European railway networks. UIC also supported the demonstration of the final web platform with regard to the rail sector’s relevant stakeholder needs and expectations in the field of graffiti vandalism.
The project provides an extensive “Collaborative Knowledge Base” empowering city administrations, public transport services and law enforcement agencies across Europe to share statistics, knowledge, good practices and prevention strategies using intuitive modules and cooperation features. Additionally, the Graffolution platform contains an interactive “Open Information Hub” addressing local communities, citizens and sprayers to strengthen public awareness and reduce illegal spraying activities, using effectual tools and visualisations.

The Graffolution initiative promotes joint approaches integrating all interest groups, including members of the sprayer communities, to reduce illegal graffiti in Europe, while positioning the issue within a global context. The created web platform serves as a central collaborative instance against graffiti vandalism for all experts, stakeholders and citizens. The platform is flexible and scalable to include future data sources, apps and modern strategies that support artistic expression while preserving public and private property and safety.

• For further information about Graffolution please contact our UIC expert:

Grigore Havârneanu, havarneanu at uic.org

• Or visit http://www.project.graffolution.eu

NeTIRail-INFRA project (end 2018) – Overview

NeTIRail-INFRA (Needs Tailored Interoperable Railway Infrastructure) is a 5.4 million euro project led by the University of Sheffield in collaboration with 12 other international partners representing railway operators, infrastructure operators and maintainers, technical industries and research organisations from the UK, France, Romania, Netherlands, Germany, Turkey, Sweden and Slovenia to develop cost effective and interoperable railway infrastructure and technologies which can be tailored to different railway system needs. NeTIRail-INFRA identifies that not all railway lines are the same and face different challenges, therefore the technologies and maintenance requirements should be tailored to suit each environment, some optimal solutions for high speed and high capacity lines will not be the optimal solution for rural lines.

The project will identify solutions suitable for lesser used railway lines and those at risk of closure. This will include technical solutions for reducing costs and understanding the wider economic and societal value of low traffic routes to communities and their contribution to the resilience of the whole network by providing alternative and diversionary routes to mainline services.

NeTIRail-INFRA will address key technology areas and consider the optimisation of these systems with respect to economic and societal impacts.

The project will also deliver evaluation and decision support tools to enable railway operators and infrastructure managers to identify the technologies and maintenance practices most suited to their specific needs and understand the viability and whole value of each line.

The NeTIRail-INFRA project started on 1 June 2015 and is a three-year collaborative project funded by the European Commission under the Horizon 2020 programme within the 2014-2015 Mobility for Growth call – MG2.1 Intelligent Infrastructure of Mobility for Growth.

UIC as a partner in the Consortium will lead Work Package 6 “IT tools” (WP leader: A. Magnien) and Work Package 7 “Dissemination” (leader: Isabelle De Keyzer), with participation in several other work packages. Over three years the project will generate a cash flow of about one million euros for UIC.

• For further information about NeTIRail please contact our UIC expert:

Isabelle De Keyzer, dekeyzer at uic.org

• Or visit http://netirail.eu