MOTIONAL – European Rail Flagship Project 1: MOTIONAL – Mobility management multimodal environment and digital enablers

1. Information about the project

The MOTIONAL project will enable better planning and operational management of rail transport in Europe. The project will contribute to the ambitious European goal of making rail the preferred mode of transport for the future. The project will make the future European railway system interoperable, resilient, capacity-adapted and capable of integrating all services, including last-mile operations. The “MOTIONAL” project will provide solutions to better manage rail traffic in Europe, which is key to achieving the envisaged Single European Railway Area. Currently, rail traffic is managed at national/regional level supported by existing systems with a low level of digitisation and poor integration with the systems of other actors involved in the overall railway planning and management process. Through the development of functional requirements, related operational or technological specifications and solutions, and by exploiting the potential of digitisation, the “MOTIONAL” project will pave the way for the implementation of the future European Rail Traffic Management System. This will make rail the basis of a multimodal passenger and freight transport system.

Digitisation allows for a fundamental transformation of the entire railway system, creating much wider opportunities for innovation in the form of machine ‘intelligence’ introduced into the system through advanced information exchange and processing solutions. These new solutions, which will be developed in all European railway centres (EU-RAIL), will make it possible to solve long-standing and difficult technical and operational problems in the railway system, such as interoperability. But more importantly, they will provide the potential to create new added value from the physical and technical resources of the railway system and from its organisational and human knowledge.

The project will implement rail planning and operation activities (concerning future linked timetable planning and operational traffic management systems) and integration activities (concerning rail services to offer door-to-door mobility). In addition, the project will provide enabling solutions for European railway centres to support the development of tailor-made digitisation solutions.

    2. Project objectives and expected outcomes 

The project will be delivered through two streams: Workstream 1 (WS1) and Workstream 2 (WS2).

Within WS1, solutions for a future traffic management system (TMS) will be developed and demonstrated that will optimally support users by combining the scheduling (capacity) and operational traffic management processes into an integrated process. The implementation of a modular, automated and user-friendly traffic management system will be based on contemporary and future innovations. The basic idea is that “it is not the process that should support the TMS, but the TMS should support the users and the interaction between the users”.

One element of this new process will be the use of rolling planning rather than planning over different horizons as is currently the case. In addition to adapted timetable planning procedures, real-time operational traffic management solutions will be developed for rail infrastructure managers.

The objectives of WS1 also include developing the attractiveness of rail by increasing integration with other modes of transport. Solutions will be developed to facilitate the customer journey during the transfer. The passenger will be provided with guidance and tools to support journey planning. The aim is to develop long-term and short-term demand forecasting using digital twins in particular. This will allow better planning and management of the different modes of transport, bearing in mind that rail will be a kind of “backbone” of the entire transport system.

The WS2 “Digital Enablers” package will use the solutions developed under WS1 and tailored to the needs of railway companies, infrastructure managers and rail industry companies. The aim is primarily to enable the digitisation of planning, engineering, asset lifecycle management, maintenance and operational processes of the railway system as a whole.

 

 3. Łukasiewicz – PIT is carrying out the following task as part of the project: “Demand forecasts for passenger flows in the short and long term”.

The task is to develop a set of solutions related to short-term and long-term demand prediction to improve resource utilisation within two “Digital Enablers”:

Enabler 23: Development of algorithms and a simplified package for determining short-term demand prediction from uptime data (e.g. ticketing data, short-term weather forecast, passenger flow) together with disturbance analysis and algorithms using this analysis for demand forecasting.

Enabler 24: Creation of algorithms and a simplified package for long-term demand forecasting with a focus on data analysis based on different sources (e.g. public events, holiday calendar) and operator data, together with a disturbance analysis performed and algorithms using this analysis for demand forecasting.

The achieved solution will be demonstrated within a set of services, related to the prediction of short-term and long-term demand forecasts for mobility in different modes. Another objective of the ongoing work is to produce software ready for testing in a demonstrator under construction. The demonstrator will concern a multimodal node in Łódź and will focus on decision support systems and data engineering mechanisms that can be used to better exploit the opportunities available for multimodal transport at a regional level.