enableATO: Automated rails transport as a backbone for sustainable, networked mobility in rural areas

The project "Automated rail transport as a backbone for sustainable, networked mobility in rural areas (enableATO)" creates a technological framework for new automated, rail-based mobility and demonstrates their interfaces with each other and with other modes of transport in the vicinity of Minden station.

The partners of the Rail Campus OWL are working on it for a period of 36 months. The project links the DZM locations and sustainably strengthens the cooperation between Karlsruhe, Hamburg, Annaberg-Buchholz and Minden in the context of mobility.

A rail system as the backbone of networked mobility in rural areas requires the automation of rail transport, smaller transport units and, if possible, "on demand" solutions.

Only this creates the basis for reactivating many rail routes and enables new mobility connections to the "classic" rail system. Technological systems, components, methods, development boundary conditions and validation processes are being researched and pre-developed in the context of automated driving (ATO). This is focused on new vehicle concepts and is technically combined via demonstrations with MONOCABs, two-way vehicles and the e-motorway concept at Minden station.

The ATO approaches developed (driving, boarding and alighting, vehicle diagnostics, connection to the control center) will be integrated in a usable way. This promises concrete findings on technology and user acceptance and will strengthen the dialog with society.

In addition to technical results, approval boundary conditions will be worked out and methods for realistic route simulation for ATO sensor systems will be researched, which on the one hand allow the simple generation of large amounts of annotated training data in different weather, daytime and environmental conditions and on the other hand enable the risk-free generation of dangerous situations for training and evaluation of environment recognition.

Intelligent Systems working group:

Prof. Dr. Büker's Intelligent Systems work group will contribute its experience in the field of autonomous driving to this project. Together with Bielefeld University, work will be carried out on the selection of suitable sensors and the development of algorithms for automated rail driving.

Interconnected Automation Systems working group:

The Interconnected Automation Systems department of Prof. Dr. Trsek will contribute its cybersecurity expertise to this project. Together with Fraunhofer IOSB-INA, DB Systemtechnik, HARTING and PILZ, they are working on a safety and security concept for ATO systems. The aim is to transfer the relevant protection concepts and security functions into a modular process that can be used for verification processes in approval procedures for ATO systems.