In2Rail held the Mid-term Conference on 17 November in Brussels
In2Rail Mid-term Conference took place on 17 November at the Sheraton Hotel in Brussels and was attended by more than 70 participants coming from all across Europe. Jointly organized by UNIFE and Network Rail and moderated by Ms. Mona Sihota (Network Rail), it was the occasion for the partners to present the first project’s achievements results and discuss with external participants about the next steps.
The conference was opened by Network Rail with a welcome speech made by Prof. Andy Doherty who welcomed all the participants and stressed the importance of In2Rail as it sets the foundations for a resilient, consistent, cost-efficient, high capacity European network by delivering important building blocks that unlock the innovation potential that exists in Shift2Rail (S2R). The innovative technologies addressed by In2Rail will be explored and resulting concepts will be embedded in a systems framework where infrastructure, information management, maintenance techniques, energy, and engineering are integrated, optimised, shared and exploited.
First achievements include the state of the art across various European partners, the development of a common approach to innovation value analysis (for both In2Rail & Shift2Rail), building upon European project outputs at Technology Readiness Level 3 (TRL3) moving on the work in S2R to TRL 6. Moreover, first promising results are beginning to be seen from radical new concepts across the project e.g. radical switch design in Work-Package 2 (WP 2), potential 3D printing of track components and improvement of maintenance activities.
The Conference continued with presentations and discussions on the main achievements in the three Sub-projects, focused on Smart Infrastructure, Intelligent Mobility Management and Rail Power Supply/Energy Management.
Mr. Henk Samson (Strukton Rail), Dr. Ian Coleman and Mr. Ian Dean (Network Rail), Mr. Anders Carolin (Trafikverket) and Mr. Federico Papa (AnsaldoSTS) opened the technical session by presenting the main achievements so far in the Sub-project on Smart Maintenance by addressing a number of working areas including Switches and Crossings, Track, Bridges/Tunnels, Commercial Off the Shelf (COTS) Monitoring and Maintenance Strategies.
The conference continued with a second set of presentations focused on the Sub-project on Intelligent Mobility Management (I2M). Mr. Carlo Dambra (AnsaldoSTS), Stefan Wegele (Siemens) and Roland Kuhn (Bombardier Transportation) reported on the main outcomes in the areas of System Engineering, Integration Layer and Nowcasting/Forecasting.
Finally, Sub-project on Rail Power Supply and Energy Management was presented by Mr. Olivier Langlois (Alstom) and Tomas Greif, who presented the work done on Intelligent AC Power Supply System and Smart Metering for a Railway Distributed Energy Resource Management System (RDERMS).
The presentations were followed by a fruitful discussion with the participants, who showed great interest in the work carried out in the first half of the project.
Andy Doherty concluded the event, with thanks to UNIFE for the organisation of the mid term event venue, and thanks to Network Rail for the coordination of the In2Rail project.
The full presentation of the event is available
HERE