Siemens Supporting a s ustainable mode of transport User Manual

Reference

Supporting a sustainable mode of transport

SIMATIC RTLS solution supports subway operation in Oslo

The Norwegian capital Oslo is the 2019 European Green Capital – in recognition of the city's many efforts towards a sustainable way of life. Public transport, and especially the subway as an alternative to your own car, represents an important pillar of the concept. A modern radiolocation solution from Siemens helps the operator of the subways to provide a high-performance and attractive offering.

“T-Bane,” tunnel railway, is what the people of Oslo lovingly call their subway, although just 17 out of the 101 stations are actually underground. Founded in 1928, the 115 trains operated at present carry almost 350,000 passengers daily on a rail network spanning 86 km. In order to achieve the ambitious climate goals of the city of Oslo – reduce CO2 emissions by 95% by 2030 and in doing so becoming a car-free city – the subway network makes a significant contribution. Notwithstanding the achievements made so far, Sporveien, the subway operator, cannot rest on its laurels: Because if the residents of the Norwegian capital

are to do without the car, they need an attractive and increasingly powerful alternative – like the T-Bane.

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The trains are serviced and repaired in the engineering workshops of Sporveien.

For years, the city, transport association, and operator have been investing in the climate-friendly expansion of the subway network. The train fleet has been undergoing modernization since 2007 and today is entirely equipped with white, energy-efficient trains of the MX3000 series from Siemens. New lines and stations are planned and being implemented, such as the new Løren station on Line 4, which was opened to traffic in 2015. Sporveien is currently working on increasing train frequency through the central inner-city tunnel, which is shared by all lines: In the future, 9–10 trains per 15 minutes are to be able to pass through the bottleneck, which means a capacity increase of up to 25%.

Digitalization in the workshops

Behind the scenes, too, the modernization of the subway system is being spurred on. Digitalization is the motto here to automate planning processes, reduce failures, improve flexibility, gain higher efficiency and decrease response time. Numerous digital systems are already in use at Sporveien – e.g. digital timetable and digital maintenance records for the trains. However, digital systems can only process the information that is fed to them. Posing a potential problem here, were the depots and the manual processes around parking-lot planning and physical parking of trains.

Previously, there used to be more manual work-processes in the depots – much due the position of the trains could not be automatically synchronized with the digital workshop system. Manual effort, hectic phone calls, and unnecessary searches were part of the daily routine of the employees, which caused some process-inefficiency getting the rolling stock ready. In particular, the manual search processes, picking out the specific train at the correct time, did cost time. Valuable service-time elapsed quickly if an employee in the depot had to walk around in the yard searching for a specific train.

With the SIMATIC RTLS gateways, the position of the vehicles is captured to within a few centimeters.

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