A knowledge-based engineering approach for supporting railway manufacturers from the tender notice to the designing phase

Abstract

This paper deals with the development of a knowledge-based engineering (KBE) approach able to support railway manufacturers in their assessments on the convenience of participating in competitive tendering and, subsequently, in the offer definition and in the designing phase. The proposed approach is based on a Decision Support System (DSS) that allows an analysis, called Adopt-Adapt-Innovate (AAI), to be made, which helps the company in the search of its products that best suit the requirements of new bids. Digital pattern techniques, configuration design methods and parametric modeling are the tools proposed to optimize the process that starts with the tender notice, passes through the offer definition and ends with the design. The paper describes the railway market logics, the proposed methodology and the first obtained results

A New Interactive Railway Virtual Simulator for Testing Preventive Safety

“…Preventive safety, on the other hand, is implemented providing the vehicle with systems that prevent the occurrence of risk conditions that could lead to a possible accident. In the railway sector, the achievement of high travel speeds and the dramatic consequences associated with accidents entail greater difficulties in the intervention of active and passive safety devices, so it is evident how important is the attention paid to the development and improvement of preventive safety systems, increasingly efficient, particularly on the driver's cab and passenger compartments [13]. The technological objectives and methodologies developed have been validated through the design and the implementation of an experimental simulator at the IDEAinVR (Interactive Design and Ergonomics Applications in Virtual Reality) laboratory of the Department of Industrial Engineering (DII) (www.ideas.unina.it) of the University of Naples Federico II, which consists of a physical/virtual prototype of a driver's cab of a railway vehicle and a augmented reality environment for the simulation of driving operations.…”