Automated and Cost Effective Maintenance for Railway (ACEM–Rail)

Acem-Rail is an ongoing research project supported by the 7th Framework Programm of the European Commission [www.acem-rail.eu[. It aims to improve the railway maintenance by the developement of a highly integrated automatic system. It focus on the track. The final goal is to reduce the costs and the interaction of maintenance operation with railway service as well as to improve the quality, safety , reliability and sustenability of the railway system. The ACem-Rail project relies in five pillars: i) developement of several track inspection technologies (some of them imbarked on commercial trains). ii)developement of predictive alorithms to estimate track effect evolution, iii)developement of optimization algorihms and thechniques for planning of maintinance tasks, iV) developement of an efficient and intelligent system to manage all subsystem included in the track and v) developement of algorithms and tools to monitor the execution of maintenance tasks. This papae presents Acem-Rail initial achievements in the first four pillars.