DINoS5G

DINoS5G is seeking to develop an end-to-end platform based on the integration of High Throughput Satellite (HTS) system and 5G terrestrial infrastructure, enabling communications for an advanced diagnostic service in the railway environment.

To this end, the aim of the project is to provide communication interfaces in applications for maintenance services, monitoring the status of the railway infrastructure and guaranteeing the real-time surveillance and safe performance (Smart Maintenance).

Railways, underground and rapid transit railways carry billions of passengers and goods all over the world, every day. They are very different transportation systems but they share a fundamental need: to provide top-quality services to their customers through reliable and safe railway operations. The purpose of the project is to create an innovative railway maintenance system that can detect serious defects at a very early stage in order to guarantee efficient maintenance and traffic management.

The project seeks to provide an innovative railway maintenance application based on predictive maintenance actions. The purpose is to produce cutting-edge technology that can fix problems before they arise. In other words, by enhancing the capacity of the railway infrastructure, an automated monitoring system will be able to carry out objective inspections and fast and accurate measurements. This solution will make possible increasingly frequent inspections due to a reduction in the time required for measurement. In some cases, such as times of high traffic or in long tunnels, inspections by humans are simply incompatible with traffic continuity, meaning that an automated monitoring system is the only possible solution.

The main goal of the DINoS5G is to develop a solution based on both 5G terrestrial communication infrastructure and satellite communications in order to provide smart and innovative maintenance management of railway infrastructure. Satellite access will be used to reinforce and improve the resilience, availability and coverage of the connectivity services in order to support diagnostics, maintenance and management of the Italian railway infrastructure of RFI. Data transferred from RFI peripheral systems via satellite and/or 5G RAN will be fed into the 5G Core network, which connects large-scale RFI central systems for diagnostic processing and smart maintenance planning and operations. Peripheral systems will appear to the network as Edge Nodes, that will select 5G RAN or SAT RAN, according to data-driven criteria and core network orchestration policies. The real added value of DINoS5G is: (a) the integration of satellite network and terrestrial facilities in the joint and complementary provision of maintenance services, activities and procedures for monitoring the status of the railway infrastructure; (b) constant surveillance and safe performance.