The STARS project paves the way for the future EGNSS deployment in safety relevant railway applications. By evolving the highly developed and deployed ERTMS standard through the implementation of the satellite positioning functionality, it will be possible to reduce the cost of the future railway signalling systems, especially for lines with lower traffic density. The project deals with three main topics: 1) The elaboration of reference data and characterisation of the railway environment through a measurement campaign; 2) The assessment of the EGNSS performances achievable in the railway environment with the determination of the applicable requirements for the positioning system as well as the necessary evolutions of EGNSS services and ERTMS/ETCS functions and 3) Quantification of the economic benefits and specifying the possible implementation roadmap when applying the EGNSS on railways. The project is strongly linked with other initiatives and actions on the same topic in Europe. In order to feed directly into the standardization work of ERTMS, the project partners will cooperate closely with UNISIG. Moreover, the project will actively interact with NGTC (EU funded FP7) and the results will be directly implemented by SHIFT2RAIL, providing the practical demonstrators for different categories of railway tracks. The approach developed in STARS is also taking the profit of the strong know-how inherited from civil aviation, making this project as completely integrated and consistent in overall activities in Europe and worldwide, leading to the effective deployment of the satellite technologies in advanced railway signalling systems.

Manufacturers of automated systems and the manufacturers of the components used in these systems have been allocating an enormous amount of time and effort in the past years developing and conducting research on automated systems. The effort spent has resulted in the availability of prototypes demonstrating new capabilities as well as the introduction of such systems to the market within different domains. Manufacturers of these systems need to make sure that the systems function in the intended way and according to specifications which is not a trivial task as system complexity rises dramatically the more integrated and interconnected these systems become with the addition of automated functionality and features to them. With rising complexity, unknown emerging properties of the system may come to the surface making it necessary to conduct thorough verification and validation (V&V) of these systems. VALU3S aims to design, implement and evaluate state-of-the-art V&V methods and tools in order to reduce the time and cost needed to verify and validate automated systems with respect to safety, cybersecurity and privacy (SCP) requirements. This will ensure that European manufacturers of automated systems remain competitive and that they remain world leaders. To this end, a multi-domain framework is designed and evaluated with the aim to create a clear structure around the components and elements needed to conduct V&V process through identification and classification of evaluation methods, tools, environments and concepts that are needed to verify and validate automated systems with respect to SCP requirements. The implemented V&V methods as well as improved process workflows and tools will also be evaluated in the project using a comprehensive set of demonstrators built from 13 use cases with specific SCP requirements from 6 domains of automotive, industrial robotics, agriculture, Aerospace, railway and health.

IN2SMART represents the 1st proposal of the Shift2Rail members referred, according to MAAP, to the following Technology Demonstrators (TDs): TD3.7 Railway Information Measuring and Monitoring System (RIMMS), TD3.6 Dynamic Railway Information Management System (DRIMS) and TD3.8 Intelligent Asset Management Strategies (IAMS). These TDs will deploy an overall concept for Intelligent Asset Management based on the following three main interlinked layers: •Measuring and Monitoring systems to collect data from the field related to the railway assets status: IN2SMART will develop unmanned systems for “remote” monitoring; track geometry, switches & crossings and signalling monitoring systems; innovative measurement of train parameters and wheel defects combined with rolling stock identifications systems. •Data management, data mining and data analytics procedures to process data from the field and from other sources: IN2SMART will develop standard open interfaces to access heterogeneous maintenance-related data; analytic tools to automatic detect anomalies, discover and describe maintenance workflow processes and predict railway assets decay towards prescriptive maintenance. •Degradation models and decision making tools to support maintenance strategies and execution: IN2SMART will lay the foundation of a generic framework for asset management and decision support process. This framework will specify the scope, objectives, workflow and outcomes of the decision-making process for maintenance interventions planning, and will be the enabler for the development of future decision support tools and systems. IN2SMART will also develop an optimised tamping tool and a robot platform for maintenance works. IN2SMART will complement the work of the IN2RAIL lighthouse project to reach a homogeneous TRL4/5 demonstrator. The following Grant will start from IN2SMART to reach the final Integrated Technology Demonstrators that will deploy the overall concept of Intelligent Asset Management.

5G solutions for verticals is a well-defined European objective. This requires developing 5G infrastructures to address a wide range of applications adopting flexible architectures, offering converged services across heterogeneous technology domains with unified software control. However, vertical industries today can only verify use cases in small scales in commercial environments, before investing in large scale deployments. Through ICT-17 projects 5G infrastructures become available to verticals to test their applications, however large-scale trials are still not possible. 5G-VICTORI will conduct large scale trials for advanced vertical use case verification focusing on Transportation, Energy, Media and Factories of the Future and cross-vertical use cases. It leverages 5G network technologies developed in 5G-PPP Phase-1 and Phase-2 projects 5G-XHaul and 5G-PICTURE and exploits extensively existing facilities interconnecting main sites of all ICT-17 infrastructures i.e. 5G-VINNI, 5GENESIS and 5G-EVE and the 5G UK test-bed in a Pan-European Infrastructure. The project will provide enhancements of existing infrastructures towards integration of a large variety of vertical and cross-vertical use cases. 5G-VICTORI’s platform aims to transform current closed, purposely developed and dedicated infrastructures into open environments where resources and functions are exposed to ICT and vertical industries through common vertical and non-vertical specific repositories. These functions can be accessed shared on demand and deployed to compose very diverse set of services in a large variety of ecosystems. 5G-VICTORI’s uniquely strong consortium brings together major players form ICT including operators, equipment vendors academic and research organisation and SMEs as well as main players from vertical industries including nationwide rail and electricity operators, rail technology vendors, media content delivery players and a number of SMEs focusing on advanced vertical services.

The PINTA Project (IP1 Traction TD1 and Brakes TD5 – Phase 1) will address the two key topics highlighted in the first Shift2Rail Call topic S2R-CFM-IP1-01-2016 – Development of concepts towards the next generation of traction systems and management of wheel/rail adhesion, namely Traction and Adhesion Management. Traction subproject will focus on the improvement of seven technical and economical performances of the Traction system that have been agreed and defined in Roll2Rail. These performances have to be improved on five different train applications having different constraints, needs and specificities, from tramway to HST, including metro, sub-urban, regional trains. In particular, Traction sub-project will address the following: 1) Line capacity increase through weight, volume and noise savings of Traction equipment. 2) Operational reliability increase via higher reliability/availability. 3) Railway system LCC reduction As far as Adhesion management is concerned, the work will lead to the achievement of a number of important objectives linked to Brakes, such as · Improvement of braking degradation limit in poor adhesion condition · Management of all adhesion conditions in a way that brake distances are optimized · Improvement of the overall train safety, which relies substantially on the management of the wheel/rail contact · Reduction of wheel Life-Cycle-Costs (LCCs) through optimized wheel/rail contact in braking The activities should contribute in formulating new performance specifications for Adhesion Recovery Systems. Moreover, improved requirements for Wheel Slide Protection test procedures should be developed, followed by new specifications for Automatic Test benches.