Smart Industry 1/2019

These days you read a lot
about autonomous cars but
you rarely see any. Of course,
there are assisting systems
that make steering a lot easier under
certain conditions – but when the
driving environment becomes more
complex, the systems are less reliable.
It will probably still take a while until
you just have to climb into a car and
tell it where to take you.
There are other means of transport,
of course, and many of them move in
surroundings that seem a lot easier to
handle. So what’s new on the tracks,
on the water, and in the air?
All Aboard the Auto-Train
With increasing traffic jams and rising
awareness of the environmental impact
of cars, many people are switching
to public transport. The Dutch rail
network, for example, projected that
the number of passengers would increase
by at least 45 percent by 2030.
Freight volumes are also rising and
source ©: prorail.nl
Best of Both Worlds
The Dutch railway
company ProRail is
experimenting with
semiautonomous
trains built by Arriva
and Stadler. Stopping
and starting is
automated, but a
driver handles the
doors and intervenes
in case of an emergency.
Getting the Ore Out
The Australian mining
company Rio Tinto
hauls up to 28,000
tons of iron ore a day
via a 2.4-kilometer-long
driverless train aptly
christened “AutoHaul.”
the Dutch railway company ProRail is
searching for ways to make better use
of the existing infrastructure.
“There are so many trains on the grid
that the distance between them is
relatively short,” said Rick van der
Mand, project manager of an autonomous
driving experiment that ProRail
carried out with partners Arriva and
Stadler in March 2019. “It’s so busy
that congestion is never far away. Automation
may prevent that.”
In a week-long trial on the Groningen
to Zuidhorn line, the group
tested a modified railcar produced
by Swiss manufacturer Stadler,
undertaking a first run operating
in Grade of Automation 2 (GoA 2)
– semiautomatic train operation
where starting and stopping is automated
but a driver operates the
doors, drives the train if needed,
and handles emergencies. With a
driver in attendance, the train made
automated stops at Groningen,
Hoogkerk, and Zuidhorn. ProRail
hailed this as a success and is continuing
the trial but the company is
not yet ready to set a date on when
the first autonomous trains will be
in everyday operation.
ATO (Automatic Train Operation) not
only allows trains to operate more
frequently at shorter headways and to
stop more precisely but also improves
energy consumption through the optimization
of acceleration, speed, and
braking. ProRail is also investigating
the use of ATO on freight trains and, in
conjunction with Rotterdam Rail Feeding
and Alstom, they ran a modified locomotive
on the Betuwe route in 2018.
A more impressive example of an
autonomous freight train is already
operating steadily on the other side
of the world: in the Pilbara region of
Western Australia in July 2018, mining
company Rio Tinto delivered iron ore
by autonomous train for the first time.
The AutoHaul project train consists
of three locomotives, is 2.4 kilometers
long, and can carry up to 28,000
tons of iron ore. It travels more than
280 kilometers north from the mining
operations in Tom Price to the port of
Cape Lambert.
The train operators are located in the
Rio Tinto Operations Centre in Perth –
which is more than 1,300 kilometers
south of the mines. “There is a train
controller at the Operations Centre in
Perth who sets the route – but once it’s
running the on-board computers
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source ©: Rio Tinto