Alfonso Lorenzo is ERTMS railway signaling project manager at Ineco and coordinator of Traffic Management Systems area of Adif's membership (Adif, Renfe, Cedex and Ineco) to ERJU, the European Railway Research Program.
For those of us who are not specialised in the railway field, what is ERTMS?
ERTMS is the European Rail Traffic Management System. It is an interoperable system, key to achieving the Single European Railway Area.
Currently the ERTMS system is composed of the train protection part, the radio communications part and the automatic train driving part. For example, concerning the train protection part, ERTMS is the interoperable system that serves to protect the train's movements, supervising that the train driver respects at all times the permitted speed according to the established route.
It should be noted that, although ERTMS is the European interoperable traffic management system, it is also being implemented outside Europe, in countries such as Brazil and Australia.
What does Ineco do in terms of ERTMS? What is your undertaking?
Currently I work as a manager in the Railway Signaling and ERTMS Management for national clients such as Adif, and for international clients such as the European Commission.
Among the tasks I perform, I highlight my work as leader of the ERTMS Deployment Management Team launched by the European Commission, in which my team and I support the EC, the European Rail Agency (ERA) and the European Climate, Infrastructure and Environment Agency (CINEA) in monitoring the ERTMS deployment.
I also monitor the evolution of the ERTMS technical specifications, defending Adif's interests before the ERTMS Users Group (EUG) and the European Railway Agency (ERA), and I perform the compatibility analysis between system versions. I am also the ERTMS expert participating in Adif's High Speed Operation Center (CORAV), analyzing incidents in the commercial operation of this level 2 system in Adif's network.
In addition to all this, you are also the technical coordinator in the TMS area of Adif's membership contribution to ERJU, the European Railway Research Program. What is the work that Ineco is doing within the framework of ERJU?
Ineco participates in ERJU as an affiliate of Adif, which is a founding member of this programme. Ineco is contributing its expertise to the definition of the requirements and architecture of the future rail system in Europe. We have a very important and central role in the definition of requirements and specifications, as well as in the development of real systems and demonstrators in which these concepts will be tested.
Let's say that Ineco's experts are working together with Infrastructure Managers, Operators and manufacturers for the design of this future railway that will become a reality in deployments throughout Europe in the coming years.
The technological scope of EU-Rail that Ineco is working on includes rail traffic management, digital and automated train operation, intelligent asset management and rail maintenance, sustainable and green rail development, transformation of freight transport and low-traffic rail lines.
Likewise, our company, as an expert engineering company in European interoperability, is involved in the use cases development, specifications and test requirements for the automation and improvement of international train path management for border crossing, increase of railway capacity, incident management with decision support systems, etc.
This is a critical project at national level and was interpreted as such from its launch by Mitma, which promoted the candidacy of Adif as a founding member of ERJU and Ineco, Renfe, Cedex and Adif AV as affiliates to that candidacy. This program is where the future railway system is defined. Ineco, thanks to this project, will obtain the knowledge of this system to continue being the reference engineering, not only for the ERTMS, but also for the future interoperable railway system.
