The Shift2Rail Multi Annual Action Plan (MAAP) will play a central role in the establishment of future interoperable railway systems suitable for European society and environment. However, it is necessary to be aware of the novel possibilities that can enable an increasingly sustainable progress in this regard. TER4RAIL will identify and monitor new opportunities for innovative research and facilitate the cross-fertilisation of knowledge from other disciplines, at what is referred to as the Rail Innovative Research Observatory. Permanent contact with other relevant sectors will have a prominent role in importing disruptive perspectives from other disciplines and facilitating interactions. TER4RAIL will determine and assess the existing roadmaps that drive the future of railways and compare them with the interpretations obtained from the observatory. This analysis will indicate the gaps that require to be covered and serve as the anchor for the prospective roadmaps. TER4RAIL considers railways as the backbone of future European mobility, as stated in the rail sector’s European Railway Research Advisory Council’s (ERRAC) Rail 2050 Vision published in December 2017, and therefore, it is necessary that TER4RAIL raise arguments that can sustain this essential system. To that end, data analysis and statistical reporting are foreseen and conducted. Finally, the work performed under TER4RAIL will be communicated to the transport community, liaising with the Shift2Rail communication team with a correlated communication strategy. A strategy of exploitation of the results will guarantee that these are properly employed in this area with maximum impact. TER4RAIL will be able to select and synthetize a considerable amount of information regarding railways’ futures and transmit them in a consolidated, improved, clear, and understandable manner. This should facilitate the realisation of TER4RAIL’s ambition of being the CSA of reference for the evolution of EU railways.

The OPTIMA project falls within the scope of the topic S2R-OC-IP2-02-2019 call – Support to development of demonstrator platform for Traffic Management – which is connected with the complementary topics S2R-CFM-IP2-01-2019, S2R-CFM-CCA-01-2019. The OPTIMA project will address the design and development of a Communication Platform to manage the link with different services (multimodal operational systems), supporting TMS applications. In this sense, the Communication Platform will link TMS applications with Traffic Management, Traffic Control, Maintenance/Energy Management and signalling field infrastructure systems. In particular, the following activities are linked with the main objectives of OPTIMA: • use of Integration Layer to integrate real-time data from the rail business service, external sources, services running in the Application Framework and operator workstations; • development, validation and verification of: o middleware of Integration Layer (or if you prefer: Integration Layer constituents and its interfaces); o software clients for connecting several rail business services and external services; o Application Framework constituents and its interfaces; o enhanced integration of the standardized operator workstations; o definition of detailed data structure according the Conceptual Data Model; o first level support for testing prototypes of complementary projects; • provision of a fully available and documented communication platform for installing and testing complementary projects prototypes. In addition, OPTIMA will disseminate project findings to relevant stakeholders and communities and will ensure the sustainability and impact of the results coming from the own activities. The Consortium is well balanced with research organizations, industrial rail stakeholders and Infrastructure Managers actively performing Traffic Management and Traffic Control in dedicated Control centers, some of them with previous participation in S2R projects.

The Needs Tailored Interoperable Railway project (NeTIRail-INFRA) focuses on infrastructure challenges affecting the large number of people and the large geographical proportion of Europe (especially recent accession countries) that are served by conventional rail lines. These lines have huge potential for a step change in productivity which must be addressed to ensure economic viability. The work will address growing demand for already busy services, and future growth of under utilised lines, with technical solutions for track, power supply and support of new smart services. Technical developments in NeTIRail-INFRA will focus on modular infrastructure, i.e. standard designs with multiple application in different locations, thereby reducing planning cycles, enabling a lean design process for new installation and retro-fit. Accompanying economic and social impact research is packaged as decision support tools to implement the findings in management of the rail network. Holistic treatment of the economy of operation will be developed, including societal impacts of rail investment decisions, to increase attractiveness of rail for all passenger categories. This focus differentiates NeTIRail-INFRA from purely technical development projects and will ensure its outputs have a real market, and achieve genuine impact. The project targets the Shift2Rail priorities of enhancing capacity, increasing the reliability and quality of services, and significantly reducing life cycle costs, and supports the Transport White Paper ‘Roadmap to a Single European Transport Area’ target that by 2050 the majority of medium-distance passenger transport should be by rail. The project targets reliability/availability up ~20%, capacity utilisation of 70-90%, and recurrent costs down 25-45%. Alongside its impact on transport, the skills developed in the project will allow European businesses and researchers to export their knowledge to wider markets, supporting EU competitiveness and growth.