The 4SECURail project was launched in Barcelona one year ago and will be executed over a total period of two years. In its first year of development, the project has successfully achieved its mid-term objectives and the members of the consortium are working at a good pace.
The 4SECURail project is being carried out by a consortium of seven European specialist partners hailing from Spain, Italy, The Netherlands, and France who are participating in the EU’s Shift2Rail Programme funded by the Horizon 2020 research funding programme. The members making up the consortium are Ardanuy Ingeniería S.A., Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche, FIT Consulting s.r.l., Hit Rail B.V., SIRTI S.p.A., TREE Technology S.A., and UIC.
At the beginning of the project an advisory board (AB) was constituted, including experts of the following companies and organisations: Infrabel, Danmarks Tekniske Universitetet, ProB, Prover, University of Twente, Expleo, Move EU Railsec, UNIFE, and Cervello Railway Cyber Security.
The AB, along with other important stakeholders in the European Railway environment, played an important role during the celebration of the technical workshops that took place in June of 2020. According to the initial plans, these meetings should have taken place in Brussels, but due to the current situation brought on by the Covid-19 pandemic, the workshops were held online.
The project team working on the development of a formal methods demonstrator for improving the railway signalling system has already released the first version of the demonstrator and has defined the use case where the demonstrator will be tested: The handover of a train between two Radio Block Centres. The team is now working on the final release of the demonstrator and performing a cost-benefit analysis of the utilisation of formal methods in the railway signalling industry.
The members of the consortium working on the design of a European Railway CSIRT (Computer Security Incident Response Team) collaborative platform have finished the design of the model and are now building the collaborative platform prototype. This platform will be useful in coordinating the Cyber Security response actions of the separate railway security teams.
All public project deliverables which have already been completed can be downloaded on the project website: www.4SECURail.eu.
Shift2Rail is a European rail initiative that seeks to encourage focused Research and Innovation (R&I) aimed at integrating new and advanced technologies through its Horizon 2020 funding and aimed at completing the Single European Railway Area (SERA). The 4SECURail project, started in December 2019 and officially launched in January 2020, will contribute to ensuring that interoperability and safety for signalling systems function properly, apart from providing measures to deploy collaborative Cyber Security support across Europe.
