During the 6th progress meeting of the EU SAFER -LC project held in Thessaloniki from 29 – 30 January 2019, the CERTH Team jointly organised with TRAINOSE a demonstration of their real‐world pilot test. This aims to improve safety at level crossings by providing alerts to drivers in the surrounding area with regard to trains approaching the LC. This implementation is one of the first in Europe to test multimodal cooperative services.

In more detail, a solution based on mobile communications has been developed by CERTH and is being tested at 30 level crossings in the surrounding area of Thessaloniki by a fleet of up to 1000 taxi vehicles from the TaxiWay taxi association and 25 – 30 trains from TRAINOSE.

The warning system based on mobile communication detects that a train is approaching an LC and sends an alert to the taxis nearby about the risky situation. The trains are equipped with Galileo-enabled devices in order to be monitored in real time. The taxis are already equipped and monitored for dispatching purposes. The warning system is provided through a dedicated popup window generated by the dispatching and navigation application already used by the taxis. The alert informs the driver about the approaching train and the expected time of arrival (ETA) to the LC, which is calculated using the speed of the train and the distance to the LC amongst other variables. Three pieces of advice are generated when the distance between the train and the LC is at either 1000, 500 or 200 metres away, providing the ETA as estimated using the speed of the train.

The demonstration was very successful; the participants went to the level crossing and could see on a tablet the alerts and the estimated arrival time of the train approaching the level crossing.

Reminder
The European Union’s SAFER-LC project, led by UIC, addresses the issue of safety at level crossings. It started on 1 May 2017 for a duration of three years. It aims to improve safety and minimise risk by developing a fully-integrated cross-modal set of innovative solutions and tools for the proactive management and design of level crossing infrastructure.
SAFER-LC has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 723205.