The kick-off meeting for the Shift2Rail JU funded project, LOCATE, was held at EVOLEO headquarters from 4 – 5 November 2019 in Porto.

LOCATE (Locomotive bOgie Condition mAinTEnance) is a €1.5 million project led by EVOLEO Technologies (SME dedicated to the development of critical electronic systems) in collaboration with five other European partners from Portugal, the United Kingdom, Spain and France, namely: the Instituto Superior Técnico (IST), the Ferrocarrils de la Generalitat de Catalunya (FGC), the University of Huddersfield, UIC, and VIBRATEC (SME dedicated to sensing technologies).

The main goal of this 24-month project starting in November 2019 is to develop a set of tools to access the condition of freight locomotive bogies to implement a condition-based maintenance programme. It is the goal of LOCATE to contribute to an optimisation of the availability of rolling stock, the quality of service, maintenance costs and return of investment.

At UIC, the project is managed by the UIC Rail System Department and UIC is leading the work package on dissemination and exploitation.

The meeting started with an overview of the LOCATE project given by its coordinator (Magno Santos from Evoleo) and by Ms Laura Piani, Shift2Rail JU programme manager, who presented the Shift2Rail JU programme and how LOCATE fits into this context.

All the partners of the consortium then presented their work plan for the next two years.

This overview was followed on 5 November by a technical meeting to prepare the work for the coming months.

This project has received funding from the Shift2Rail JU under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme, under Grant Agreement 881805.