Network Rail and Innovate UK have announced four winners who will each get a slice of a £300,000 grant to support automated design projects in rail infrastructure.
Costain Limited, Graffica Limited, PEAN Technologies Limited and Plume Rail Limited all secured a share of the collaborative research and development competition grant.
The competition, launched in November, called for rail solutions that apply automated design to track layout, overhead line electrification, traction power supply systems, and signalling systems.
Atish Chauhan, project manager at Network Rail, said: 'Using automated design will help Network Rail with producing better designs faster and support our support long-term service planning by allowing better assumptions about future infrastructure and associated changes to services.'
Kelvin Davies, innovation lead for rail at Innovate UK said it was 'a very successful competition with a high level of interest, bringing together a range of organisations with different skills and specialisms.
'We look forward to working with Network Rail to deliver the exciting portfolio of projects over the coming 12 months and to help demonstrate the capability of automated design for planning different aspects of future railway systems.'
Winning projects
Costain Ltd
Project name: Rail: Automated Infrastructure Design – R:AID
Partner Organisation: Bryden Wood Technology Limited
Costain and Bryden Wood's longstanding and innovative partnership is leading disruption of the traditional design/engineering services marketplace through the development of an integrated suite of tools to automatically design the infrastructure of the future.
Graffica Limited
Project name: Infrastructure Design and Evaluation Framework
Partner Organisation: VolkerRail Specialist Businesses Limited
Graffica will explore how existing tools can be integrated to make use of data from specialist railway tools and other third-party sources.
PEAN Technologies Limited
Project name: Development of automated track layout design tools
PEAN Technologies aim to develop a suite of tools that will generate and automatically adjust track layouts until they are clash free and compliant with the user-defined criteria.
Plume Rail Limited
Project name: Automated Traction Power Simulation and Design
Plume Rail are looking to develop a solution that will allow for quicker assessment of the impact of changes on the network’s power system. Solutions will be driven by the needs of timetable planners and modellers
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