# Unlocking Digital Collaboration: The MINERVE Project as Catalyst for the Railway Infrastructure

Elodie Vannier, Judicael Dehotin, Pierre Jehel, Camille Saleix

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Elodie Vannier, Judicael Dehotin, Pierre Jehel, Camille Saleix. Unlocking Digital Collaboration: The MINERVE Project as Catalyst for the Railway Infrastructure. Transport Research Arena Conference, Apr 2024, Dublin, Ireland. pp.204-211, 10.1007/978-3-032-06763-0_30. hal-05336651

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# Unlocking Digital Collaboration: The MINERVE Project as Catalyst for the Railway Infrastructure

Elodie Vannier<fnref n="1" />(✉), Judicael Dehotin<fnref n="1" />, Pierre Jehel<fnref n="2" />, and Camille Saleix<fnref n="1" />

elodie.vannier@reseau.sncf.fr

**Abstract.** The railway sector brings together heterogeneous industry bodies and actors to design, build, and operate railway systems. The digitalization of the rail sector is supported by numerous technologies and the abundant developments go beyond the organization level and require coordination at the sectorial level. As French railway infrastructure manager, SNCF Réseau has launched the innovative research and development project MINERVE. This project brings together the main players in the French rail sector to build a collaborative ecosystem around railway infrastructures challenges and to develop a shared vision of digital continuity. The challenges addressed in MINERVE are related to the transition towards a more efficient, reliable, and environment-friendly railway operation by designing and building with collaborative digital methods and tools. The main objective is to reduce the overall cost and impact of the railway system while increasing collaboration between stakeholders.

MINERVE outcomes are related to specific, standardized, and interoperable methods and tools, for all technical fields, and that can be implemented and adopted by all stakeholders. The MINERVE project is a one-of-a-kind project to unlock digital collaboration at the sectorial French industry level to improve the life span of the infrastructure as well as the environmental performance of railway projects including biodiversity and resilience to climate change.

**Keywords:** Digital continuity · BIM · Digital Twin

## 1 Introduction

Railway companies have launched digitalization programs integrating BIM and the digital twin (DT) to improve their performance and internal production processes. Rail services are produced based on technical and organizational resources involving most of the time many supplier companies, service providers, manufacturers, etc. Infrastructure managers, for example, rely on the construction industry, but also on companies

<footnote n="1">¹ Engineering, Asset Management And Maintenance Direction, Engineering and Innovation Technical Division, SNCF Reseau, 06 Avenue François Mitterrand, La Plaine Saint, 93210 Denis, France</footnote>

<footnote n="2">² Université Paris-Saclay, CentraleSupélec, ENS Paris-Saclay, CNRS, LMPS - Laboratoire de Mécanique Paris-Saclay, 91190 Gif-Sur-Yvette, France</footnote>
specialized in electronic and computer systems, engineering systems, and consultancy companies to manage the handling of trains and traffic management. As a result, significant changes in the production methods of an infrastructure manager have a heavy impact on the entire railway sector. At the same time, to improve their performance, contributing companies are also led to carry out transformations to better respond to their customers. In this context, the individual transformation programs of each company will not be enough to address sectoral issues that require coordination not only at the level of each company but at the scale of the whole industry.

Sectoral collaborations are limited to the creation of standards for the exchange of data and best practices on digital tools. For example, the railway industry has collaborated at a global level for the integration of railway concepts in the ISO 16739 standard (IFC) to facilitate the interoperability of modeling tools. The players in the railways sector also collaborate within various digital projects for new products and components. The question that then arises is the following: is this collaboration enough to allow the sector to address challenges such as global performance, or environmental issues (decarbonization, climate change...) ? In the literature, digital collaboration is most often approached from the angle of a collaboration platform or even collaborative design or co-engineering processes (Felson (2013) Karrasch (2017), Danfulani and Anwar (2018)). Within these approaches, actors attempt to integrate sectoral concerns such as the integration of the environment into disciplines by finding innovative methods. Questions about the method of sectoral collaboration to facilitate integrated solutions are rarely addressed.

The production of railway infrastructure is carried out with strong coordination between stakeholders to ensure the safety of train movements. The decisions of some stakeholders during the design phases may have an impact on other actors in the railway system. In this context, process improvements and more particularly digital transformation approaches internal to stakeholders can have a global impact downstream of productions carried out with new methods. Furthermore, the challenges on environment require collective coordination of stakeholders to adapt each production to these issues and find optimal solutions that meet these challenges. Accordingly, the railway infrastructure manager launched an original project to facilitate stronger sectoral coordination for coherence of digital transformations at the industry level. The MINERVE project was launched by the main players in the rail sector in France to address the issues of the rail sector from both a scientific and process point of view in a context of strong pressure from public authorities on increasing performance for transporting large numbers of people without increasing carbon emissions.

This paper will first discuss the collaborative approach underlaying the whole project, then expose an overview of its first results and finally will discuss those results and give a glance at the upcoming developments of the MINERVE projects.

## 2 MINERVE, A Collaborative Research Initiative with All the Sector Stakeholders for Tackling Railway Challenges

The railway infrastructure sector brings together many heterogeneous industry bodies and actors to design, build, and operate railway systems. In the context of accelerating digitalization, it is essential to coordinate heterogeneous approaches to build and implement the digital continuity as an enabler for the railway infrastructure performance over
the entire design - operation - maintenance cycle. Indeed, the digitalization of the rail
sector is supported by technologies such as BIM, DT, AI, and IOT, as well as by the
adoption of systems engineering, and the development of traffic simulation tools. These
ongoing developments go beyond the organization level and require coordination at the
sectorial level. That is why the MINERVE project has been designed as a collaborative
innovation project at the industry level, bringing together the two main French infras-
tructure managers (SNCF Réseau and RATP Infrastructures), engineering companies,
public work companies, research institute and academics.

The MINERVE project outputs will contribute to accelerate the transition towards a more efficient, more reliable, more environmentally friendly railway construction and operation, by designing and developing efficient digital methods and tools for infrastructure modeling to reduce its overall impact on climate change while increasing its competitiveness. More specifically, the MINERVE project aims to:

* *Anticipate and optimize the construction phase*, based on sustainable BIM methods and tools, taking into account each civil work domain characteristics.

* *Develop the DT*, explore the potential of AI as a decision support tool for exploitation and maintenance of the railway infrastructure, capitalizing on the BIM models.

* *Develop an industrializable*, standardized, and shared vision of the interfaces, by building a collaborative ecosystem around the modeling of linear infrastructures.

Capitalizing on the wide experience of its members, the MINERVE project is built
as action research since it pursues action (or in the current situation experimentation)
and research (or understanding) at the same time to identify and experiment value-added
actions to coordinate all organizations towards reaching common goals at the sectoral
level. Therefore, the project methodology relies on:

* *Semi directive interviews* to identify needs of the railway industry actors and formalize them in operational requirements to identify convergence points and required alignments of tools and methods to increase their industrial performance.

* *Recent research results on railway reference architecture building* (Sango et alii, 2022), conceptual data models, ontologies, and multidisciplinary and multimodal optimizations. This reference architecture is a shared foundation of the MINERVE project. It aims to handle system requirements and components performance, and to facilitate the use of heterogeneous data structures to address different system capabilities. Moreover, such an architecture is a prerequisite to build a multi-domain and multi-phase collaborative platform that could be ultimately used on all phases of the design - operation - maintenance cycle.

* *Experimentation of solutions on real railway infrastructure construction sites*, when partners have identified that a digital solution brings added value on one or several phase of the design - operation - maintenance cycle.
# 3 First Results of the MINERVE Collaborative Project

## 3.1 Common Understanding of the Impact of Introducing Digital Technologies on the Railways Sector Production

In the field of railway design, an important area of work was to share a common understanding of the production tools of the different actors, their functional areas (electric traction, tracks, telecom, signaling) and what BIM methods change in current production. Feedback took place in all domains and allowed railways sector stakeholders to share best practices allowing real performance gains. These exchanges also make it possible to progress on common sectoral specifications for the entire sector (Fig. 1).

<figure><img src="image_2.png" /><figcaption>**Fig. 1.** Illustration of overall railways architecture, designed within the framework of Horizon 2020 – Shift2Rail projet Linx4Rail, Grant agreement ID: 881826</figcaption></figure>

## 3.2 A Digital Twin Concept for the Design of Performant Railways

Monitoring the global performance of a railway system is becoming increasingly important as new constraints are imposed on the system: increased number of travelers, multiplication of environmental constraints linked to climate change, reduction of the environmental impact of rail transportation. Besides, designing and building railway assets are complex tasks, which calls for better collaboration between the various stakeholders and for digital services that enhance it. Complexity arises for several reasons. First, the subsystems are numerous and heterogeneous including tracks, civil engineering structures (bridges, tunnels, earthworks), equipment (mechanical, electrical, electronic), the fauna and flora surrounding the tracks. Second, various human organizational structures are established at the subsystem and system levels for carrying out the design and building tasks. Third, the global performance of the railway system strongly depends on its subsystems. For instance, a retaining wall damaged by a flood, an organization that struggles to respect a work schedule are local issues that can result in a series of disruptions and impact the global performance of the railway system.
<figure><img src="image_3.png" /><figcaption>**Fig. 2.** DT concept for designing and building railway systems at the organizational level. [Left] Railway manager perspective where the outputs of the DT processing are used for aiding decision. [Right] The proposed DT concept integrates the engineering practice with an iterative process organized by subsystems experts.</figcaption></figure>

DTs in the design phase of engineering projects has been recently investigated as for instance in the work of Thelen *et al.* (2022) and van Beek *et al.* (2023). In the framework of the MINERVE project (railway engineering), a DT concept for designing infrastructure systems that reach global performance requirements has been proposed by Jehel and Vialle (2023). At the organizational level, the DT processing enhances collaboration between stakeholders providing them with digital services during the process (see Fig. 2). At the functional level, families of services that the DT should provide have been identified during a series of 21 interviews with subsystems experts. From these interviews, the following 5 functions are expected:

* *Retrieving the current state of the railway infrastructure.* Whether in brownfield or greenfield projects, the already existing railway assets as well as the environment and context should be retrievable at the beginning of the project and then maintained in the DT.

* *Executing repetitive tasks.* Tasks are repeated either by the same people or by different people. Such tasks should be automated and shared as much as possible.

* *Checking essential specifications.* If such a specification is not satisfied, the whole project is at risk. They should be checked automatically as often as possible.

* *Managing uncertainties and tolerances.* Each subsystem should be able to develop between margins that are admissible by the other subsystems.

* *Fostering mediations between subsystems experts.* Digital services should be developed to assist them in this process for communicating their results and understanding the results of the others.

Ongoing work in the development of this DT for designing and building is at the operational level where case studies such as clearance checking along the tracks are being investigated in a multi-disciplinary group where all the interdependent subsystems are represented. The objective is to identify what needs to be digitally instantiated in the DT to support the tasks and processes involved in for instance clearance checking, and then to effectively instantiate it for testing the DT.
## 3.3 Algorithm and Method for Massive Detection of Railways Asset on Large Lengths of Track

The production of BIM models of existing infrastructure is essential but costly in terms of time and investment, particularly in a context of very extensive linear networks. In MINERVE project, the objective is to produce methods and algorithms for detecting railway objects in points clouds to massively produce BIM models of legacy infrastructure to better anticipate the planning of operations. The results will allow software publishers to improve the functioning of their tools in context railway.

Object detection in images or point clouds is already addressed in several initiatives. In our project, we are particularly interested in the components of the railway system both to identify objects, to extract information or even to extract geometric elements used in business production. In many situations, the challenge remains to feed the knowledge we have of legacy components or to produce models with a view to creating a new design. This has been particularly experienced in the engineering works professions and in the field of tunnels, electric traction professions and telecommunications. The detection of rail wires is also tested (Fig. 3).

<figure><img src="image_4.png" /><figcaption>Fig. 3. Illustration of track (a) and telecom equipment (b) detection in a point cloud data, 3D point clouds of the French railway network processed with SNCF Réseau proprietary softwares.</figcaption></figure>

## 3.4 Results of the First Set of Experimentations on BIM to Field

As described above, lot has been done with BIM in the design phase of a rail infrastructure. Today, there is a discontinuity between the design and construction phases of a railway infrastructure project. Construction operatives have different work patterns than design operatives. That's why mixed or augmented reality (AR) can address their needs. For instance, using 3D helps the construction staff to put things into context very quickly, to locate themselves in the worksite and, by simulating the movements of road-rail shovels or work trains, become aware of potential dangers. Other use cases of AR on site is the ability for the construction workers to locate themselves very precisely thanks to a tablet or a smartphone to check the conformity of the ongoing construction with of the 3D model and compare both, check the recolement to ensure/verify the coherence between the actual realization and the model as built...

In early 2023, SNCF Réseau tested its first site briefing using BIM models. Safety is one of the company's top priorities, and even more so when carrying out rail works. One of the objectives of this first experimentation of BIM to field was to provide a
better contextualization of the work situation and its environment, using kinematics representing the first 8 h of work. One of the first feedback from the organizer of the site briefing is that this kinematics helped during his speech to remind visually the safety elements for each situation (not only but pointing out on the construction plan).

SNCF Reseau is now intending to go further in the development of BIM to field, together with the MINERVE project partners. We are currently working to improve and make more reliable 3D simulations using 4D planning. One of the key results targeted in the MINERVE project is to specify and experiment different methods for developing BIM in the field.

For BIM to be useful and fully integrated in the construction phase, we need to go beyond technical experimentation and support those involved on the site to work differently, in a more collaborative way, by demonstrating them the added value of such technologies, improving the reliability of the work carried out in terms of time.

# 4 Discussion and Conclusions

At the end of the work phases, the civil work companies deliver an executed work file in PDF (non-digital) which constitutes the main information source for the asset manager. With BIM productions, new data schemas have appeared with the IFC format allowing management of data from the design construction phase. Infrastructure managers databases for asset management are quite far from this format. The objective of the project is to propose methods, architecture, and prototype tools to test how BIM can feed asset managers databases without manual re-entry.

Furthermore, the concepts of system integration and system architecture in railways and concurrent engineering appear and allow process optimizations and work reliability thanks to digital data. This project involves exploring the opportunities offered by these methods with the aim of improving existing processes.

Finally, the production of BIM models opens the way to the more extensive exploitation of data from the design and construction phases to the downstream phases, in particular operation and maintenance within the framework of DT concepts of assets. This project will be about progressing on these concepts and proposing uses of the DT in connection with the laws of aging of structures for maintenance planning, but also avenues for managing subjects such as adaptation to climate change.

This paper presents some of the efforts deployed in the MINERVE project for unlocking digital collaboration in railway infrastructure projects among all the stakeholders. The MINERVE project is planned to run until 2026. Hence, it will further strive to improve its technological developments and go a step further on experimentations to become a major provider of methods and tools specifications towards sustainable railway infrastructures.

The research and developments carried out in the MINERVE project should be accompanied by changes in the architecture, engineering, and construction industry to achieve operational progresses. Indeed, practitioners are facing increasingly difficult decisions regarding what capabilities to select when deploying a DT. Agrawa et al. (2022) state that a DT nowadays offer many capabilities and sophistication levels and that there is a risk of a DT being rejected by practitioners in case of an inappropriate selection among these capabilities. Therefore, they proposed a digitalization framework
to help practitioners select an appropriate level of sophistication in a DT by weighing the pros and cons for each level. Besides, compared to the traditional design – bid – build approach, more global methods like Integrated Project Delivery where major stakeholders in the project become signatory to a single contract agreement have been successfully implemented to encourage collaboration.

**Acknowledgements.** The MINERVE project has received funding from the French Government under the France 2030 – CORIFER research and innovation programme.

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