It will allow critical security equipment to be remotely managed and upgraded.
The UP2DATE project, an R&D initiative within the European Union’s H2020 programme, will complete its research phase at the end of the year and its results can already be applied to the railway and automotive sectors.
One of the main objectives of the programme for the railway industry is to achieve remote and secure loading of different applications in high-performance embedded systems. In other words, it will allow all the signalling equipment on a railway line (interlockings, ERTMS equipment, etc.) to be updated safely and in the shortest possible time from a single point on the line.
CAF Signalling, a technological subsidiary of the CAF Group specialising in Railway Signalling Systems, is the only company representing the railway area that forms part of this cluster made up of companies from different sectors. “Centralising the remote management of equipment by remote downloading and updating data remotely for safety-critical systems means significant cost savings for the industry, both in economic and personnel terms. In short, this methodology will reduce the economic cost and time of updates, which means making better use of maintenance bands”, says Juan María Orbegozo, Head of Trackside Product Development at CAF Signalling and leader of the railway section of Up2Date.
CAF Signalling will be in charge of carrying out the railway use case demonstrator before the end of the year. It will therefore become one of the industrial use cases that will help to ground the project’s research; that is to say, it will be responsible for demonstrating the applicability in industry of the results obtained in the academic field.
The new technologies provided by the project will allow the installation of the latest developments in control systems or the modification of parameterisation data without the need for travel.
The Up2Date initiative, which has a budget of 3,846,290 euros, started in 2020 and will end in December of this year. This project involves both technology companies (TTTech [Austrian], IAV [German], Marelli [Italian] and CAF Signalling [Spanish]) and research centres (Ikerlan and BSC [Spanish] and DLR [German]).
