Projects

Summary

The FP1-MOTIONAL project aims to improve the planning and operational management of railway services, contributing to the European goal of making rail the preferred mode of transport. The project seeks to develop a future European Traffic Management System (TMS) that is interoperable, resilient, capable of adapting capacity and integrating all involved services, including last-mile operations provided by other transport modes, harnessing the potential of digitalisation.

The project is structured into two major Work Streams (WS). WS1 focuses on planning, operations and integration activities. WS2 provides a set of digital enablers across the entire programme to support the development of specific digital solutions for different destinations, such as Digital Twins, the Rail Data Space, and the exploration of a potential extension of the existing railway CDM.

Objectives

Improving the planning and operational management of services is essential to achieve the ambitious European objective of making rail the preferred mode of future transport. The future European railway system will be interoperable, resilient, capable of adapting its capacity and integrating all involved services, including last-mile operations, taking advantage of the opportunities offered by digitalisation. Developing the future European Traffic Management System is key to achieving the envisioned Single European Railway Area (SERA).

Today, railway traffic is managed at national or regional level, relying on legacy systems with low levels of digitalisation and limited integration with systems used by other actors involved in the overall process of traffic planning and management.

Through the development of functional requirements, associated specifications and operational or technological solutions, and by leveraging the potential of digitalisation, the FP1-MOTIONAL project is paving the way for the implementation of the future European Traffic Management System, with the aim of making rail the backbone of a multimodal transport system for both passengers and freight.

The activities planned to achieve the goals of Strategic Area 1 are carried out in two main Work Streams.
Work Stream 1 (WS1) includes three main areas: Planning activities and Operational activities (focused on future timetable planning systems and interactive traffic management), and Integration activities (focused on rail-centred door-to-door mobility offerings).

Digitalisation is a transformative process that encompasses the entire Railway System, offering new opportunities for innovation by incorporating “intelligence” into the system through advanced solutions for information sharing and processing. These new solutions, which will be developed across all EU-RAIL Strategic Areas, will help address persistent technical and operational challenges in the Railway System, such as interoperability. More importantly, they will enable the creation of new added value from the system’s physical and technical assets, as well as its organisational and human know-how.

Work Stream 2 (WS2) will provide a set of digital enablers for all EU-RAIL Strategic Areas (i.e., in a cross-cutting manner), to support the development of destination-specific digitalisation solutions, including:

• A common, scalable, reliable and interoperable infrastructure for data exchange and communications.
• A common semantic and syntactic machine-readable description of data.
• A common environment for planning, engineering, developing and operating digital assets and Digital Twins.