Rail Open Lab

The Rail Open Lab allows players from the rail industry to test and/or improve products under real conditions as part of sprints in response to use case requests received from the field.

The need expressed in this particular sprint concerns safety during shunting on railway worksites and aims to:

• Check compliance of the routes taken by agents either on the job and/or ordered remotely
• Check lane occupancy to know if a route is passable

In association with SNCF Réseau and as part of the Rail Open Lab, SCLE and Vossloh have developed a solution to meet this need: TCO Digital.

This solution is a verification assistance tool for self-checks performed by agents after shunting operations, in order to guarantee their safety during rapid-suite maneuvers.

TCO is composed of the following elements :

• Sensors installed on equipment (connected axle counter, connected switch controller, electronic lever-position detector)
• Operations logic executed on an IoT platform where data received from sensors is stored
• A Digital Optical Control Panel (TCO) in the form of a web-based application that can be consulted on a digital tablet which allows the agent at the maneuvering post to view the route taken and to supervise lane release and free parking zones
• A Connected Origin Indicator display Panel (TIP) positioned at the edge of the tracks indicating the number of the track taken to ground operators (shunting controller, driver)
• TIP Watch connected watch used to display the number of the track taken for shunting agents on the ground.