Overview
SIA has the objective of 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). These new services will help to reduce 15% of railway maintenance costs, 25% of maintenance unscheduled events and 15% of derailments associated with the rail-wheel interface. These new end-to-end services are supported by a system that will adapt and integrate existing products (TR9) and technologies (TRL5-TRL7) as STEREO®, WINDSepe® and ERSAT_CPS® among others, brought by the consortium.
The features of the services rely on an accurate and available positioning that will be achieved thanks to the distinguished characteristics for the railway environment of the EGNOS and Galileo multi-frequency multi-constellation signals (e.g. E5 wideband signal with Altboc modulation has high code range precision through reduced code noise and multipath). SIA will build on existing EGNSS based pilot projects such as H2020-ERSAT EAV and H2020-FR8RAIL within the context of Shift2Rail.
SIA will also build on standards and best practice guides (e.g. GEGN8578, IEC613735-2-6, RailTopoModel among others), which will foster EGNSS adoption in the railway environment. Complementary, and with the same importance level to the technical development, SIA has the objective of paving the way for the market uptake of the new services. With this regard, four pilot projects have been planned to validate the performance of the new services in fully operational scenarios and will be used as a commercial platform for potential end-users. The preliminary business plans reveals a very promising business potential with a ROI of 126%, an accumulated turn-over of 34M€ in five years and acquired income rights of another 58M€ for the fifth year. Three high-tech SMEs are leading the project, representing approximately 40% of the project effort.