Rail Engineering The Way Ahead

Modern railways are no longer the sole forte of civil and mechanical engineering. They now involve a broad range of multidisciplinary engineering domains from advanced computing, digital telecommunications, and networking to big data analytics and even artificial intelligence. Among the emerging technologies and innovations in railways, hyperloop transportation systems employing magnetic propulsion, hydrogen-powered trains, and autonomous intelligent systems in the control and command subsystems of railways have significant potential to improve the performance of railways in terms of speed, service availability, comfort, sustainability, and potentially safety. These innovations will also help mitigate carbon emissions. This volume presents the latest research on railway engineering and transportation and discusses the practices and processes involved in shaping modern railways.

These conference proceedings update the use of computer-based techniques, promoting their general awareness throughout the business management, design, manufacture and operation of railways and other advanced passenger, freight and transport systems.

A railway is a complex distributed engineering system: the construction of a new railway or the modernisation of a existing one requires a deep understanding of the constitutive components and their interaction, inside the system itself and towards the outside world. The former covers the various subsystems (featuring a complex mix of high power sources, sensitive safety critical systems, intentional transmitters, etc.) and their interaction, including the specific functions and their relevance to safety. The latter represents all the additional possible external victims and sources of electromagnetic interaction. EMC thus starts from a comprehension of the emissions and immunity characteristics and the interactions between sources and victims, with a strong relationship to electromagnetics and to system modeling. On the other hand, the said functions are achieved and preserved and their relevance for safety is adequately handled, if the related requirements are well posed and managed throughout the process from the beginning. The link is represented by standards and their correct application, as a support to analysis, testing and demonstration.