Kick-off meeting of SIA held on 7 March 2018 in Prague 

The kick-off meeting of the EU-funded SIA project was held on 7 March 2018 at the GSA (European Global Navigation Satellite Systems Agency) in Prague in the presence of more than 20 participants representing its eight consortium partners from five European countries.

SIA (System for vehicle-infrastructure Interaction Assets health status monitoring) is a 3.4 million Euro project, led by the Asociación Centro Tecnológico CEIT-IK4 in collaboration with eight other international partners from Spain, France, Germany, Austria and UK. This 36-month project began on 1 March 2018 and includes partners from the railway sector, high-tech information and communication industries and research organisations, namely:

• Asociación Centro Tecnológico CEIT-IK4
• UIC – International union of railways
• Deutsches Zentrum für Luft – und Raumfahrt EV
• Ingeniería y Control Electrónico SA
• Teléfonos Lineas y Centrales SA
• Vias y construcciones SA
• ÖBB-Infrastruktur AG
• Ferrocarrils de la Generalitat de Catalunya
• Nottingham Scientific Ltd

SIA project aims at developing four 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).

Mr Daniel Lopour, officer of GSA responsible for the SIA project, gave the welcome address, explaining the relevance of the use of new EGNSS technologies (based on Galileo and EGNOS) for non-safety related applications in the railway domain, such as asset management.

Mr Unai Alvarado, coordinator of the project, presented the project’s context and its main objectives, addressing the importance of having potential end-users of the systems to be developed within the consortium.

The project challenges will concern the exploitation of the new EGNSS services to leverage a more accurate and reliable positioning of trains and assets in four new end-to-end services. These services will optimise the maintenance operations of a wide range of potential customers, such as Infrastructure Managers (IMs), Train Operating Companies (TCOs), Integrated Operators (IOs) and Maintenance Subcontractors (MSs).

SIA claims to reduce the maintenance costs related to the most critical assets in the railway domain by 15%, reducing the service unavailability due to maintenance-related non-planned actions by 10%, while reducing by 15% the risk of derailments associated with broken rails.

This project is funded by the European Commission under the Horizon 2020 programme under grant agreement 776402.

For further information please contact Christine Hassoun, Senior Advisor, Project dissemination: hassoun@uic.org