ECO-RAIL

EGNOS Controlled Railway Equipment

Achievements

Development and testing of a GNSS based, integrated positioning system for rail vehicles; demonstration of a specific safety-critical application.

Brief Description

Due to ongoing developments (EGNOS, GALILEO), satellite navigation is about to become an interesting innovation for all fields of transport. One of them is the railway domain, which could considerably profit from the implementation of autonomous on-board positioning systems. Especially for local and regional railway lines various applications would allow a cost-effective modernisation and an increase of efficiency.

However, train control poses high demands on positioning with respect to availability, reliability and integrity. These requirements can only be fulfilled by means of integrated positioning systems, which combine GNSS with other sensors. The concept of the ECO-RAIL prototype includes GPS/EGNOS, odometry and map information (GIS). In order to show the capabilities of such a system in a realistic railway environment, the specific application of ALX (automatic level crossing) control was selected for testing and for a final demonstration.

TeleConsult was primarily responsible for the design and implementation of the GIS component, and contributed to the requirements specification and the system design.