ICT to improve Rail Service Quality

Train positions, train capacity or infrastructure restrictions are just a few examples of essential data for the SMART-RAIL project. In order to use these data at different levels of decision making, the data needs to be shared between all stakeholders participating in the railway ecosystem. The main objective of Work Package 5 is to define, develop and implement an effective set of tools and measures which supports freight rail stakeholders in controlled data sharing, thus improving the rail service quality.

To reach this objective, the relevant ICT systems need to interface across organizational boundaries; they need to be interoperable. Not only do these system share data technically, they also have to be able to consistently interpret and process this data. However, each stakeholder in the railway ecosystem and its IT systems has its own data format, communication standard and semantics, which makes the exchange and interpretation of data still challenging.

Within Work Package 5, TNO, ABIRAIL, H-LOG and other SMART-RAIL partners develop an architecture supported by a platform for controlled data sharing between all the relevant actors participating in the Continuous Improvement Tracks. The development of a unified semantic model for the SMART-RAIL context, describing the meaning of the concepts, is an important part of the architecture. An appropriate governance model with access control measures, defined within Work Package 5, will ensure data privacy and safety for data owners and offer controlled data sharing. Among others, the applicable legislative, liability aspects and commercial sensitivity are considered here.

Also, the requirements and feedback from the three Continuous Improvement Tracks in the project (CITs) are incorporated into the solution – as the CITs will exploit the results in the end. This way Work Package 5 and its proposed platform will form the data backbone of the SMART-RAIL project.