CEIT-IK4 develops a rail platform within the European project EATS, which was funded by the European Commission.
EATS (ETCS Advanced Testing and Smart Train Positioning System) European project coordinated by CEIT-IK4 has as one of the main objectives to develop new on-board location systems by combining GNSS, UMTS and GSM-R technologies and including multi-antenna configurations in the train. Two of the expected advances of ETCS signalling system are the implantation of safe on-board location systems based on satellite technologies and the migration from ETCS level 2 to level 3.
In order to design, implement and evaluate the new location systems, an innovative platform called ATLAS (Advanced Train LocAtion Simulator) has been developed, which is characterized for being modular, extensible and highly configurable. It allows configuring the train to be analysed together with the on-board location systems and even the route to be studied. Moreover, it provides a powerful performance evaluation tool that allows visualizing the results of hundreds of simulations at a glance. The platform is currently used not only to evaluate the location systems that have been developed within the EATS project, but also to analyse the behaviour of (new or existing) location systems in new routes, to compare different location systems in the same route, to quantify the enhancement applied to existing location systems, etc.
More information:EATS European project web page: http://www.eats-eu.org/ Paper about the ATLAS platform: http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12544-015-0173-5
