Roman Ehrler

Safe train positioning is a key technology to make rail transportation more efficient and cost-effective. Within the EGNSS MATE project, the project partners SBB, DLR, and IABG researched the use of European Global Satellite Navigation Systems for this application. The main contributions are the development of a novel map-based sensor fusion algorithm, the development of a test catalogue for jamming and spoofing cyberthreats, and the collection of a large and rich dataset for testing and validation. The dataset includes over 200 h of sensor data and ground truth data, covering most of the Swiss normal gauge network. In addition, tests were conducted to assess the impact of jamming and spoofing attacks. Results show promising performance of the algorithms on most of the lines, excluding some long tunnels and sections with heavy multipath. The findings of the project results will help to introduce safe train positioning into ETCS by boosting development and standardisation efforts.

In a coordinated mobility-on-demand system, a fleet of vehicles is controlled by a central unit and serves transportation requests in an on-demand fashion. An emerging field of research aims at finding the best way to operate these systems given certain targets, e.g., customer service level or the minimization of fleet distance. In this work, we introduce a new element of fleet operation: the assignment of idle vehicles to a limited set of parking spots. We present two different parking operating policies governing this process and then evaluate them individually and together on different parking space distributions. We show that even for a highly restricted number of available parking spaces, the system can perform quite well, even though the total fleet distance is increased by 20% and waiting time by 10%. With only one parking space available per vehicle, the waiting times can be reduced by 30% with 20% increase in total fleet distance. Our findings suggest that increasing the parking capacity beyond one parking space per vehicle does not bring additional benefits. Finally, we also highlight possible directions for future research such as to find the best distribution of parking spaces for a given mobility-on-demand system and city.