Railway User Navigation Equipment (RUNE)

Introduction

In the Railway User Navigation Equipment (RUNE) project, a team led by Laben (Italy) is using European Geostationary Overlay Service (EGNOS) as part of an integrated solution to improve the train driver’s situational awareness.

Today, the driver does not receive advanced warnings of the status of signals or speed restrictions and, as a result, it is harder to deploy drivers on new lines. RUNE integrates EGNOS/GPS with other on-board positioning sensors, and signalling and speed restriction information from a central control centre. This will significantly improve safety as a result of improved situational awareness, and should also speed up the deployment of drivers on new routes.

Objectives

The primary objective is to demonstrate the improvement of the train self-capability in determining its own position and velocity, with a limited or no support from the track side, and to show that the equipment can comply with the European Railway Train Management System (ERTMS) requirements. The achievement of such objective would lead to the reduction of the frequency of balises distributed along the track line and typically needed to reset the train odometer error. This implies a significant reduction of the infrastructure costs by replacing physical balises with virtual balises, still maintaining the level of safety currently provided. The RUNE project involves both a HW-In-the-Loop laboratory set-up as well as a 3 months field-testing on-board an experimental train of the Italian operator Trenitalia.

Applications

The main applications of RUNE are going to be in the Rail domain with particular interest in ERTMS compatible railway operations.

Consortium

RUNE has been developed by the European Space Agency in partnership with the Italian company Laben.

Contact points

Livio Campa at Laben: Campa.L@Laben.it
At ESA: Michel.Tossaint@esa.int