Overview
The PLASA project intends to significantly increase customer experience and system robustness in the European rail sector. It aims at ensuring that the Research & Innovations Activities dealing partially or entirely with railway planning, relevant data or safety issues within the different S2R Innovation Programmes are considered completely and holistically.
This project addresses two out of six different working areas (WA) within S2R Cross Cutting Areas (CCA) in line with the S2R Multi Annual Action Plan (MAAP). These areas are WA 3.1 Safety and WA 4.1 Smart Planning (afterwards named as sub-projects). It aims to ensure that the Research & Innovations activities dealing partially or entirely with railway planning, relevant data or safety issues within the different S2R Innovation Programmes are considered completely and holistically.
In Europe, different and often not perfectly suitable planning tools are in use today to simulate railway operations. This leads to results which may not be comparable. Even more important we have a data landscape that has no proper and open data interfaces between different countries implemented. Thus, the simulation of cross-border connections will be more difficult. In addition to the heterogeneous data landscape, no tool has yet been implemented that is able to simulate with a high degree of detail on the one hand, and that can also be used for large networks. In that trade-off, either a wide network or a high degree of detail is dominant. In short, a lack of research in railway simulation can be identified and needs to be overcome. Furthermore, this project will encompass additional research and innovation activities, which will foster significant improvements in long term railway traffic planning. These coherent improvements will enhance performance and resilience whilst lowering costs in future railway activities.
In addition, in the field of railway safety a broad approach that is not only based on rules and policies is missing. Although railways have a high aspiration level on safety, structured risk assessments have been neglected in the past. In the automotive and aerospace sector already such comprehensive methods are used. Although railway transportation has a long history in safety management, current approaches do not cover all situations by rules and safety it is often insufficiently managed in operation. In particular, risk management is often not based on a complete risk assessment and thus, inappropriate decisions and a decreased safety level in railways can arise. The expected impact of PLASA's Safety sub-project is to deliver a methodology to improve the design making process for safety management