The Assets4Rail project, in which Bexel Consulting participates, has begun on December 1st 2018. Asset4Rail project is one of the new projects within Shift2Rail, the European rail initiative promoting research and innovation by seeking focused research and innovation (R&I) and market-driven solutions. Shift2Rail uses the approach of accelerating the integration of new and advanced technologies into innovative rail product solutions while promoting the competitiveness of the European rail industry and meeting changing EU transport needs.

The overall objective of Assets4rail is to find new ways to achieve cost efficient and reliable railway infrastructures, especially by use of measuring, monitoring and data handling for railway assets such as bridges, tunnels, tracks and safety systems. Assets4Rail project is separated into two Workstreams, WS1 Tunnels and bridges (incl. noise) and WS2 Track, vehicles and safety systems.

The keystone of the infrastructural part of the project is to be a dedicated information model (BIM). This model with integrated algorithms will gather and analyze the information collected by specific sensors monitoring various factors affecting the rail infrastructure, such as subsurface tunnel defects, fatigue consumption, noise and vibrations of bridges and track geometry. From the other side of the project, train monitoring systems will be installed and will collect data detecting defects that impact the infrastructure. The combination of data collected in real-time with existing data analysed together by deep learning techniques will pave the way towards new and innovative processes for infrastructure maintenance to be validated in field.

Assets4Rail will benefit from a strong multidisciplinary consortium composed of 19 partners from 10 countries, of which Bexel Consulting is a proud member.

This project has received funding from the Shift2Rail Joint Undertaking (JU) under grant agreement No 826250. The JU receives support from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme and the Shift2Rail JU members other than the Union.

This publicity reflects the author’s view and the JU is not liable of any use of this publicity.