Descripción del proyecto
As a measure to achieve the objectives of the European Green Deal on transport, the European Commission took the initiative to promote 2021 as the European Year of Rail arguing that this means of transport not only connects citizens physically, but is also a basic element of political cohesion and that the proposal for 2021 comes at a time when the Union needs to strengthen its collective commitment.[1] Under this perspective of socio-political interest, the 4RAIL project (TECSA-LIMMAT-TECNALIA-UVIGO) is presented, whose objective is the development of a digital platform aimed at supporting the intelligent management of maintenance in the railway sector with advanced functions such as automatic inventory and predictive/cognitive track maintenance. This project seeks to guarantee the safety and comfort of the railway thanks to the development of a digital infrastructure maintenance platform helping to make the best decisions at the right time, that is, on time.4RAIL proposes a new maintenance system thanks to the use of Artificial Intelligence in the different phases that are part of the inventory and maintenance work in rail: Developing new tools based on remote sensing and geo-spatial information sciences for the digitization, inventory and inspection of railway assets (UVIGO), Automating rail inspection tasks that, today, are manual (UVIGO/TECNALIA), Development of IoT and piezoelectric sensors and optimized monitoring strategies (TECNALIA), Developing a Datalake as a heterogeneous storage repository using a flat architecture to store the data (LIMMAT), Incorporating Artificial Intelligence techniques to be able to develop predictive/cognitive maintenance strategies from the condition (TECNALIA/UVIGO), Allow the visualization of the results and main indicators in real time (LIMMAT/TECSA), Harmonizing a human-centric platform with the real needs of the end user of the platform who in this case will be a railway manager-maintainer (TECSA/LIMMAT).In summary, 4RAIL proposes the development of a data-powered software platform for the railway sector that integrates automated inventory and predictive/cognitive maintenance services for track segments. The three major technologies with which the project works are Laser Scanning, IoT-sensing and Artificial Intelligence, and the integral objective of the project is to improve the competitiveness and efficiency of companies from the point of view of the management and maintenance infrastructure.