Train MD Project description

TRAIN-MD (INtelligent TRansport for dangerous goods) is a collaborative research project coordinated by SNCF which involves nine participants. Its foremost aim is the traceability of dangerous goods and the safety of their transport.  
TR@IN-MD project is part of the Innovation and Research in surface transports Program (PREDIT) which is linked to the French National Research Agency (ANR) and supported by the Agency of Environment and Managing of energy (ADEME).

 

TR@IN-MD project started in 2006 and will finish at the end of 2010.
This project comes within the scope of a framework dominated by technology. It consists of :

  • The follow up and the localisation of wagons,
  • The diagnosis and supervision of safety wagon and their goods in the railroad environment,
  • Analysis and data transmission in real time – in order to offer new services and to set up an innovative information system concept of rail freight, safer, more reliable and reactive.

TR@IN-MD Project has as a main purpose the development, experimentation and evaluation of a system dedicated to sensitive transports of dangerous goods (MD).
In order to do so, embedded systems on wagons coupled together with sensors, allow to automatically measures in real time all differences between the real position of the wagon and the expected one. A first inventory showed that the most important needs in relation to convey of dangerous goods concern the transport of gas and acidic, in particular:

  • The monitoring of pressure and temperature in tanks in real time
  • The detection of leak (concerning gates, tank’ vault)
  • The detection of a series of chemical component present in the air

At the first sign of danger, after detecting an event, the information system used in TR@IN-MD will consent to speed up its processing in taking the information over all concerned people (freight operators, railway managers, system loaders, backup system…) according to the degree of seriousness.


The information provided by the system enables the anticipation of future consequences or risks. Such system gives strong advantages for managing all means and maintenance of quality of the railway services.
The system will provide to loaders a localisation and traceability service which is strongly at stake due to the dangerous goods facing the regulations evolution.


Moreover, global traceability experimentation will be carried out thanks to the merging of SISTTEMS project (development of a multimodality news agency platform) and TR@IN-MD.
All data provided by the system will be processed after the event so that the setting of correcting actions will be possible, in particular for all security aspects or fleet managing.

 

A video is at your disposal for a better understanding of the research project.