The project “SMART RAIL” aims to increase the resilience of railway infrastructure during various operating conditions with particular attention to adverse weather phenomena that may occur in the different environments in which this infrastructure is present and operational.

The distributed monitoring of the railway contact line and the high voltage line dedicated to its power supply is the objective of this project. To achieve this goal, the railway trolley and the high voltage conductor will be equipped with an optical fiber  along their entire length so as to transform them into distributed sensors. Furthermore, to make the information obtained from the fiber  available, a multi-technology optical interrogator will be developed.

To achieve efficient and widespread monitoring, it seems optimal to apply monitoring simultaneously on two fronts: the energy transmission network that supplies the railway network (smart conductor) and the catenary, i.e. the structure that directly supplies the circulating trains (smart trolley). In order to offer an effective solution that can be applied industrially in the immediate future, the “smart trolley” and “smart conductor” elements must be integrated with a multi-technology interrogator for distributed fiber optic sensors capable of extracting distributed measurements of temperature, mechanical deformation and acoustic vibrations, as well as equipped with artificial intelligence systems for the recognition of acoustic fingerprints in order to automatically identify the anomaly conditions from the characteristic “signature” of the detected parameters.