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.

The key aspects for this proposal, FR8HUB, is the emphasis on increasing the efficiency in the nodes, hubs and terminals in the railway system for freight and to continue development in freight locomotives of the future. FR8HUB answers to the member call for Shift2Rail IP5 AWP 17 and thereby propose activities in new development areas together with continuation of progress in Technical Demonstrators (TD) started in AWP 15. To succeed with implementation of technologies developed within Shift2Rail IP5, FR8HUB will also initiate development of a strategy for implementation of relevant technologies to secure market uptake.

The Future Railway Mobile Communication System (FRMCS) will be the 5G worldwide standard for railway operational communications, conforming to European regulation as well as responding to the needs and obligations of rail organisations outside of Europe. The work on functional & technical requirements, specification & standardisation in 3GPP as well as regarding harmonised spectrum solutions is currently led by UIC, in cooperation with the whole railway sector. A major challenge is the update by European Railway Agency of the Technical Specifications for Interoperability of Control Command and Signalling (CCS TSI) by the end of 2022 with a full description of FRMCS with respect to interoperability functions. Therefore, the 5GRAIL project aims to verify the first set of FRMCS specifications and standards (FRMCS V1) by developing and testing prototypes of the FRMCS ecosystem. The validation of the latest available railway-relevant 5G specifications will be achieved through cross-border emulation trials covering significant portions of railway operational communication requirements and including the core technological innovations for rail expected from 5G release 16 and pre-release 17. The project will first define functional tests and then work towards the development and evaluation of prototypes, for both on-board and infrastructure, including vital (ETCS, ATO) and essential (voice specific services, TCMS and video) applications. Prototypes will be then tested in simulated and real environments, with pilots in labs and in the field rolled out in various European sites (France, Hungary and Germany), to ensure compliancy and validation for FRMCS specifications, standards and performance, and consequently guarantee the time to market for FRMCS deployments, planned for 2025 as per European timeline. 5GRAIL will finally deliver test report conclusions to potentially update FRMCS V1 specifications and to identify technical constraints related to implementation issues.