Dr. Matteo Frea, Wabtec, ITALY

Mr. Luc Imbert, Wabtec, ITALY

With new technological breakthroughs come new challenges for all the actors across that same industry, and this can be said for the Automatic Train Operation in the railway industry.

This new way of operating trains increases the need for safe monitoring and management of the train’s braking performance.

The future brake systems are expected to reliably and predictably perform an emergency braking therefore ensuring a high accuracy of the train’s stopping distance.

To satisfy the need of the upcoming market, a new solution and method is proposed allowing to mitigate and compensate for degraded conditions, whether they are linked to environmental conditions (such as low wheel rail adhesion conditions) or failures of on-board equipment. The solution is based on the safe monitoring of the train deceleration and the safe management of the braking force allowing the new brake system to reach the targets of reliability and predictability of the emergency braking.

This solution is based on research and technologies developed in the frame of the Shift2Rail program (PINTA, PINTA2 and PIVOT2 projects), where Faiveley/Wabtec is fully engaged developing a new generation of adhesion management systems. Dedicated experimentations in relevant environment have shown promising signs on the reliability of the braking distance compared to the traditional systems.