The overall objective of the RAILS research project is to investigate the potential of Artificial Intelligence (A.I.) approaches in the rail sector and contribute to the definition of roadmaps for future research in next generation signalling systems, operational intelligence, and network management. RAILS will address the training of PhD students to support the research capacity in A.I. within the rail sector across Europe by involving research institutions in four different countries with a combined background in both computer science and transportation systems. RAILS will produce knowledge, ground breaking research and experimental proof-of-concepts for the adoption of A.I. in rail automation, predictive maintenance and defect detection, traffic planning and capacity optimization. To that aim, RAILS will combine A.I. paradigms with the Internet of Things, in order to leverage on the big amount of data generated by smart sensors and applications. The research activities will be conducted in continuity with ongoing research in railways, but the methodological and technological concepts developed in RAILS are expected to stimulate further innovation providing new research directions to improve reliability, maintainability, safety, security, and performance. With respect to safety, emerging threats and certification issues will be addressed when adopting A.I. in autonomous and cooperative driving, based on the concepts of "explainable A.I." and "Trustworthy AI". With respect to cyber-physical threat detection, innovative approaches will be developed based on A.I. models like Artificial Neural Networks and Bayesian Networks together with multi-sensor data fusion and artificial vision. Resilience and optimization techniques based on genetic algorithms and self-healing will be addressed to face failures and service disruptions as well as to increase efficiency and line capacity. All those techniques will pave the way to the development of the new "Railway 4.0".

The scientific objective of the ADVANCE project is to conceive new approaches to support the Verification and Validation (V&V) of Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS). It will explore techniques, methods, and tools applicable to different phases of the system lifecycle, but always with the final objective of improving the effectiveness and efficacy of the V&V process. In particular, ADVANCE will focus on two main aspects of V&V: i) techniques to collect V&V evidences for a CPS (focusing on system modeling, testing, fault forecast, and systematic processes like FMEA), and ii) techniques to manage and analyze data of the system under analysis (focusing on data analysis, requirements management, traceability). The strategic objective of the project is to build an international network of collaborations on the topic of V&V of CPSs. Besides allowing the consortium to reach the project’s scientific objectives, the established interactions would allow the training of students and professionals on the latest innovations in the V&V panorama, and have them work together towards a common goal. In fact, besides the technical challenges described above, an important factor hampering advancements in the V&V of CPSs is a worldwide lack of skilled professionals in V&V, software testing, and Information and Communication Technology (ICT) in general. One of the outputs of the project will be a set of training material, both in the form of slides and video courses, on the topic of Verification & Validation of Cyber-Physical Systems. These objectives will be pursued by joining together V&V experts having different specialization and different backgrounds, and establishing a targeted transfer of knowledge and collaboration program, using two real case studies as reference throughout the project.