The high-level objective of TAURO is to identify, analyse and finally propose suitable founding technologies for the future European automated and autonomous rail transport, to be further developed, certified and deployed through the activities planned for the European Partnership for Transforming Europe’s Rail System. To achieve this, TAURO is divided into four technical WPs, following the scope of the call, that each deal with separate system elements, with each contributing to the overall goal of the project. These four areas of work are; • Environment perception for automation • Remote driving and command • Automatic status monitoring and diagnostic for autonomous trains • Technologies supporting migration to ATO over ETCS These technical WPs will be supported by a comprehensive dissemination and exploitation WP that will guarantee the results from TAURO are communicated to the necessary stakeholders, standards and regulatory bodies to ensure that the future policy and technical decisions are taken on the basis of the science and research performed in TAURO, and more important, who guarantee the coherence with other Shift2Rail ongoing activities and assure a seamless bridging between TAURO and the next initiative within Horizon Europe, Transforming Europe’s Rail System.

The railway sector is currently acting in a fragmented way and in silos, corresponding most often to physical or functional subsystems or use cases, and the different owners/managers of the overall infrastructure at regional/national level, without global extensive view or full control of the global system involved by rail operations. With the progress of digitization, analogue devices based on relays were progressively substituted by digital ones, and it is more and more evident that enabling the communication between already existing digital tools for various subsystems can be beneficial. What is missing is an efficient, automated and standardized way for these integrated and interplaying systems to act as one ecosystem: sharing, integrating, identifying, correlating and exploiting the right data at the right time. In order to meet these challenges, the objective of LinX4Rail is to develop and promote within Shift2Rail framework and beyond, a sectorial common Functional Railway System Architecture. It will be supported by a widely adopted Shift2Rail Conceptual Data Model (CDM) that will, with the commitment of the Shift2Rail members, through Shift2Rail Programme Board Change Management Process, establish the standard for interactions between legacy and new systems and thus ensure sustainable interoperability between systems. The ambition of LinX4Rail is to achieve a comprehensive approach for the CDM, global system modelling specification and a strategy for implementation of technological breakthroughs, including RCA, with the inputs from a communication system perspective and give a vision of future evolution of Functional Railway System Architecture.

The STARS project paves the way for the future EGNSS deployment in safety relevant railway applications. By evolving the highly developed and deployed ERTMS standard through the implementation of the satellite positioning functionality, it will be possible to reduce the cost of the future railway signalling systems, especially for lines with lower traffic density. The project deals with three main topics: 1) The elaboration of reference data and characterisation of the railway environment through a measurement campaign; 2) The assessment of the EGNSS performances achievable in the railway environment with the determination of the applicable requirements for the positioning system as well as the necessary evolutions of EGNSS services and ERTMS/ETCS functions and 3) Quantification of the economic benefits and specifying the possible implementation roadmap when applying the EGNSS on railways. The project is strongly linked with other initiatives and actions on the same topic in Europe. In order to feed directly into the standardization work of ERTMS, the project partners will cooperate closely with UNISIG. Moreover, the project will actively interact with NGTC (EU funded FP7) and the results will be directly implemented by SHIFT2RAIL, providing the practical demonstrators for different categories of railway tracks. The approach developed in STARS is also taking the profit of the strong know-how inherited from civil aviation, making this project as completely integrated and consistent in overall activities in Europe and worldwide, leading to the effective deployment of the satellite technologies in advanced railway signalling systems.

X2Rail-1 addresses the S2R-CFM-IP2-01-2015 “Start-up activities for Advanced Signalling and Automation System” call issued by the Shift2Rail Joint Undertaking as part of the Innovation Programme 2 “Advanced Traffic Management & Control Systems”. The X2Rail-1 project aims to research and develop six selected key technologies to foster innovations in the field of railway signalling and automation systems towards a flexible, real-time, intelligent traffic management and decision support system. The actions to be undertaken in the scope of X2Rail-1 are related to the following specific objectives: To overcome the limitations of the existing communication systems by adapting radio communication systems which establish the backbone for the next generation advanced rail automation systems. To improve the usable track capacity by introducing more Automatic Train Operation (ATO) systems and Moving Block systems. To innovate the signalling architectures towards more decentralized and less cost intensive systems by incorporating Moving Block systems and Smart Wayside Objects. To minimize energy consumption and to improve train punctuality through more extensive use of Automatic Train Operation (ATO) systems. To increase innovation in the field of lab testing by developing architectures for new lab test systems and simulations for control, command and communication systems in order to reduce costs. To ensure security among all connected signalling and control systems by developing new cyber security systems dedicated to railways. To ensure the backward compatibility of ERMTS/ETCS technologies, notwithstanding of the required functional enrichment of the future signalling and control systems.