MOVINGRAIL Online Workshop on Roadmap and Business Risks for Virtual Coupling

6th May 2020

Given the current global circumstances, a MOVINGRAIL online workshop has been organised by project partners at the University of Birmingham and TU Delft. The MOVINGRAIL project aims at the further development of train-centric signalling systems to significantly improve capacity of the various types of railway systems. This online workshop focused on Virtual Coupling, which is an extension of the moving block concepts being developed by other MOVINGRAIL tasks.

The purpose of the virtual workshop was twofold: to define a roadmap for the implementation of Virtual Coupling in European railways and to finalise a set of business risks and rank them. Surveys were distributed one week prior to the online workshop to get an understanding of priorities and time orders of the different roadmap steps as well as to assess probabilities and impacts of Virtual Coupling business risks.

Twenty-two participants across Europe have participated and provided valuable input. Discussions have been held on several propositions based on the roadmap survey results and on the estimation of duration to some of the activities. Ultimately, the roadmap has been visualised online in a Swimlane template based on the survey results and the workshop discussions. A top 10 list of the business risks has been provided by the University of Birmingham after analysing the probabilities and impacts extracted from the survey results.