In November, Paris will be immersed in the world of digital rail when the three-day Intelligent Rail Summit 2019 takes place at the UIC headquarters. This high-level conference that will be held on 19, 20 and 21 November will address the topics Automatic Train Operation and the Digital Railway.

The conference will kick off on Tuesday, November 19 with a visit to a leading rail project in the Paris region. On Wednesday 20 November, the theme of Automatic Train Operation (ATO) will be led by the chairman of the day and Professor of Railway Traffic Management and Operations Rob Goverde of Delft University of Technology. He will give an introduction to the various applications of automation in rail operation and will his vision on future technologies.

Automatic Train Operation

Pavel Popov of Russian Railways has been involved in various trials with ATO on heavy rail tracks in St Petersburg and Moscow the last few years. He is currently developing a system that detects objects on the track with the aid of video, infrared and lidar technology. This should ensure that trains can run under Grade of Automation 3 or 4 in the near future.

Matthew Lewis and Richard Plokhaar from Gannett Fleming Canada will make a comparison between the SkyTrain in Vancouver, the oldest ATO system in the world, and the newest CBTC system of the Toronto Subway. They thereby focus on the operational side of ATO on the regular and metro tracks.

Digital Railway

On November 21, the experts delve deeper into the Digital Railway theme, with CER CEO Libor Lochman telling about the digitization policy priorities 2019-2024 recently presented to European politicians.

Miki Shifman of the Israeli cybersecurity specialist Cycle will evaluate the common misconceptions about cybersecurity on the track and provides insight into a hacker’s perspective. He will elaborate on the implementation of a rail-specific monitoring system for cybersecurity. He will additionally present a case study from the rail sector.

Giorgio Travaini of Shift2Rail expects digitization to ensure that “the rail system” can become more a whole (“a system of systems”) and that the interaction between the different subsystems can be optimized. During the congress, he explains how this is being worked on within Shift2Rail.

More information about the conference programme and registration can be found on the event website www.intelligentrailsummit.com.