The RUNE Project: Design and Demonstration of a GPS/EGNOS-Based Railway User Navigation Equipment

Railway operations can be significantly improved by the use of global positioning systems in terms of navigation accuracy, safety and assistance to the operations. The EGNOS and WAAS will augment the GPS signals with additional, accurate information, and add significant strength to the overall system. This will ensure the accuracy and integrity for multi-modal transport applications, thus making user applications more reliable and more accurate. The use of the GNSS-1 signals by the railways represents a technical, industrial and operational challenge. The railways have a consolidated experience using other means of navigation, which may not be ideal, but are well known and familiar to the operators. On the other hand, railways, like other modes, have to cope with a number of new challenges and are under economic pressure to improve and optimize significantly their operations in terms of track occupancy, safety, productivity and customer satisfaction. LABEN is leading a consortium for the development and demonstration of the RUNE equipment, under ESA contract. The 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 train operator Trenitalia. 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. RUNE will produce to the on-board Train Control equipment a balise-crossing message when a virtual balise is detected. In addition RUNE assists the locomotive engineer on approaching signal locations on the basis of a track map and on controlling the train velocity on the basis of allowed velocity profiles. The paper will present the RUNE equipment architecture in terms of sensors and navigation filter design and will provide preliminary results obtained from the laboratory set-up..