ICT platforms in support of future railway systems

The predicted growth of transport, especially in European railway infrastructures, is expected to introduce a dramatic increase in freight and passenger services by the end of 2050. To support sustainable development of these infrastructures, novel data-driven Information and Communication (ICT) solutions are required. These will enable monitoring, analysis and exploitation of energy and asset information for the entire railway system including power grid, stations, rolling stock and infrastructure. To address these challenges, we propose a dynamically reconfigurable advanced communication platform enabling connectivity between a variety of monitoring devices and computational resources through a heterogeneous network infrastructure. The connectivity, coordination and collaboration required is provided, on an on-demand basis in accordance to the
cloud computing paradigm. The benefits of this platform in the end-to-end service delay and power consumption are quantified over the 5G Bristol is Open network topology.