The LOCATE project will develop a set of tools to access the condition of freight locomotive bogies to imple-ment a condition based maintenance program. It is the goal of LOCATE to contribute to an optimization of the availability of rolling stock, the quality of service, maintenance costs and return of investment. The LOCATE project consortium is composed by 6 entities from 4 different countries, namely: - EVOLEO Technologies: SME dedicated to the development of critical electronic systems; - IST Instituto Superior Técnico: University and Research Centre - University of Huddersfield: University and Research Centre - FGC Ferrocarrils de la Generalitat de Catalunya: Railway Operator, Railway Infrastructure Manager, Railway Entity in charge of Maintenance, Research - UIC International Union of Railways: International Association of Railways Operators and Infrastruc-ture Managers - VIBRATEC: SME dedicated to sensing technologies.

SIA has the objective of developing 4 ready-to-use new services (iWheelMon, iRailMon, iPantMon and iCatMon) to provide prognostic information about the health status of the railway’s most demanding assets in terms of maintenance costs (wheel, rail, pantograph and catenary). These new services will help to reduce the 15% of railway maintenance costs, 25% of maintenance unscheduled events and 15% of derailments associated to the rail-wheel interface. These new end-to-end services are supported by a system that will adapt and integrate existing products (TR9) and technologies (TRL5-TRL7) as STEREO®, WINDSepe® and ERSAT_CPS® among others, brought by the consortium. The features of the services rely on an accurate and available positioning that will be achieved thanks to the distinguished characteristics for the railway environment of the EGNOS and Galileo multi-frequency multi-constellation signals (e.g. E5 wideband signal with Altboc modulation has high code range precision through reduced code noise and multipath). SIA will build on existing EGNSS based pilot projects such as H2020-ERSAT EAV and H2020-FR8RAIL within the context of Shift2Rail. SIA will also build on standards and best practice guides (e.g. GEGN8578, IEC613735-2-6, RailTopoModel among others), which will foster EGNSS adoption in the railway environment. Complementary, and with the same importance level to the technical development, SIA has the objective of paving the way for the market uptake of the new services. With this regard, 4 pilot projects has been planned to validate the performance of the new services in fully operational scenarios and to be used as a commercial platform for potential end-users. The preliminary business plans reveals a very promising business potential with a ROI of 126%, an accumulated turn-over of 34M€ in 5 years and acquired income rights of another 58M€ for the 5th year. Three high-tech SMEs are leading the project representing approximately 40% of the project effort.

Rail freight transportation is a system service where a multitude of players, participants and systems providers bear a high degree of responsibility for its attractiveness and performance. It shows high efficiency as transportation means, in terms of land use and energy consumption and low greenhouse gas emissions. However rail’s market share of freight transportation and its economic efficiency continues to be limited. Aimed at overcoming such uncertainty, this project addresses one of the most important key resources for further developing rail freight transportation: the optimization of the performance of the rail freight wagon. The continuous pressure on environmental issues and energy efficient transport is forcing the rail transportation sector to enhance the rail logistics services and to incorporate innovative solutions to improve load capacity to keep the “best-in-class” position and, therefore, acquiring a much privileged position beyond alternative terrestrial transport source, as truck transportation. Thus, aimed at optimizing rail freight transportation, the main objective of this project is to holistically address the aspects that may improve freight wagon performance: enhanced logistics, improved multimodal operative, higher load capacity, optimized filling/emptying time and flexibility to transport multi-products. This project aims to achieve such optimization by combining industrial expertise on the freight wagon design and construction, advanced materials for lightweight construction and logistics with the research capabilities to incorporate innovation solutions and optimize material performance.