RIMcomb: Rail Information Modeling for Railway Equipment Design

Description

The current practice in designing railway equipment technology is mainly based on exchanging 2D plans, which results in error-prone and inefficient processes. RIMcomb's goal is, therefore, to develop a holistic IT approach to support the collaborative, multi-discipline planning processes of railway infrastructure equipment technology.

The core of the approach pursued is the development of a vendor-neutral data model. This model allows the description of track systems and railway equipment with specific properties and object classes. Design processes in railway engineering require various representations from 2D representations of the track topology to highly detailed 3D representations for complex geometric situations. For this purpose, Building Information Modeling (BIM) methods are transferred and applied in the context of railway engineering. New deployment methods for model changes ("patching") are considered. Besides, procedures for semi-automated code compliance checking will play an increasing role in future collaboration processes. Since a lot of railway projects have to deal with refurbishment issues of existing tracks, another important objective is the correct inventory recording. Thus, an additional important research goal is the further development of model generation mechanisms. Point clouds obtained by laser scanning or photogrammetry are used to generate semantically enriched 3D models.