Last may Siemens opened a new space for innovation counting on 350 employees and channeling an annual investment of €20 M per year.
Siemens, a global leading company in technology, inaugurated the Railway Signalling Competence and R&D&I Centre last month of May with the presence of His Majesty the King of Spain, Felipe VI. The R&D&I Centre is born with the double aim of producing, testing and developing the most modern railway signalling and traffic control systems, and, at the same time, training professionals from this field in these technologies. Among the 350 people working at its premises, most of them graduates in Engineering (Industrial, Telecommunications, Computing…), although there are also mathematicians and physicists, near 200 will work in the field of Research, Development and Innovation, and about 150 in Project Execution.
This Centre brings together knowledge and technique to design, test and deliver products or systems customized according to the latest safety requirements and needs of the market and will encourage the research and development of technologies that improve the current ones, among which ERTMS (European Railway Traffic Management System) or CBTC (Communications-Based Train Control) stand out. Staff will also work there in other systems such as the signalling interlocking Westrace, the PTC (mining and freight transport) or the traffic control centre Rail 9000.
Morevoer, it will be equipped with a laboratory with field simulators so that they can virtually work on the effectiveness of the developed systems, and with a thermal fluctuation resistance control area.
At this moment, the company is developing international projects for New York, Changsha (China) or Singapore undergrounds; Sao Paulo and Istanbul commuter lines; Meca-Medina (Saudi Arabia) or Ankara-Konya (Turkey) High Speed Lines and Nacala Freight Railway Corridor (Mozambique), and also different projects in Spain, such as the High Speed Lines between Madrid and Valencia or Córdoba and Málaga.
Together with this Centre, a ‘ShowRoom’ conceived as a meeting place to show Siemens’s technology to partners, customers, institutions and other public was also inaugurated. It is a multidisciplinary space equipped with the latest technology where the main lines of the company’s activity can be displayed by means of videowalls and workstations, and in which people can attend virtual demonstrations of some of its most symbolic projects.
In addition, this centre will be devoted to training sessions as well as to every type of operation tests.