Most maintenance activities in the current railway system are carried out on a scheduled basis. This potentially means that components and sub systems are not replaced at the optimum time and that components fail between interventions. SMaRTE will provide the methodology for implementation of a Condition Based Maintenance system appropriate for the railway. This will allow maintenance to be tailored around the actual remaining life of key components and will reduce costs and improve reliability and availability. Knowledge and experience from other sectors will be extracted and new scientific methods for handling data and setting up architectures and intelligent systems to process data will be developed; appropriate to the railway system. Case studies will be designed and carried out for two different but typical passenger railways and lessons learned will be used to improve the system definitions. The final result of the SMaRTE project will be a CBM system which works for passenger railways and will result in reduced system costs and improved system reliability. The premise of SMaRTE (Human Factors) is that reducing customer cognitive effort is key to rail usability. Achieving a more streamlined process of accessing rail should increase its attractiveness. Whilst there is substantial evidence on the impact of factors such as fares / journey time on rail usage, the impact of more subtle factors deterring passengers from using rail are less understood. SMaRTE places the focus on the customer, utilising an innovative multi-disciplinary approach to understand the primary factors impacting on user decisions to choose rail (or an alternative) – and producing new quantitative evidence on the relative importance of those factors. The final result of SMaRTE will be a set of quantified factors influencing rail usability, and recommendations on how to decrease the cognitive effort and onward mobility for rail journeys through a “Smart Journey Vision” and rail map of measures.

NIMBLE: collaboration Network for Industry, Manufacturing, Business and Logistics in Europe will develop the infrastructure for a cloud-based, Industrie 4.0, Internet-of-things-enabled B2B platform on which European manufacturing firms can register, publish machine-readable catalogs for products and services, search for suitable supply chain partners, negotiate contracts and supply logistics, and develop private and secure B2B and M2M information exchange channels to optimise business work flows. The infrastructure will be developed as open source software under an Apache-type, permissive license. The governance model is a federation of platforms for multi-sided trade, with mandatory interoperation functions and optional added-value business functions that can be provided by third parties. This will foster the growth of a net-centric business ecosystem for sustainable innovation and fair competition as envisaged by the Digital Agenda 2020. Prospective NIMBLE providers can take the open source infrastructure and bundle it with sectoral, regional or functional added value services and launch a new platform in the federation. Internet platforms need fast adoption rates and the work plan reflects this: we start attracting early adopters from day one and develop the initial, working platform in year one. Added-value business functions follow in year two and final validation at large scale, involving hundreds of external firms, will happen in year three. Our adoption plan is designed to enable two or more platform providers at the end of the project, and to have 1000 to 2000 enterprises connected to the overall ecosystem at that point. NIMBLE has 17 partners grouped around 3 main activities: developing the infrastructure, running a platform adoption programme, and validating the platform with 4 supply chains (white goods, wooden houses, fashion fabrics, and child care furniture). NIMBLE will give manufacturing SMEs in Europe a stable and sustainable digital ecosystem.