Automated and cost effective maintenance for railway (ACEM-rail)

ACEM-Rail is an ongoing research project supported by the 7th Framework Programme of the European Commission [www.acem-rail.eu]. It aims to improve the railway maintenance by the development of a highly integrated automatic system. It focuses on the track. The final goal is to reduce the costs and the interaction of maintenance operations with railway services as well as to improve the quality, safety, reliability and sustainability of the railway system. The ACEM-Rail project relies in five pillars: i) development of several track inspection technologies (some of them embarked on commercial trains), ii) development of predictive algorithms to estimate track defect evolution, iii) development of optimization algorithms and techniques for the planning of maintenance tasks, iv) development of an efficient and intelligent system to manage all subsystem included in the track and v) development of algorithms and tools to monitor the execution of maintenance tasks. This paper presents ACEM-Rail initial achievements in the first four pillars.