Blog Post

SIMAFE PROJECT, OPERATIVE TRACK BALLAST TAMPER SIMULATOR

may 17, 2016

A few months ago, we announced the meeting of the consortium for the Railway Maintenance Simulators project (Spanish acronym: SIMAFE) co-financed by MINECO through INNPACTO 2012 (IPT-2012-0225-370000) and the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF).


At the beginning of this year, as a result of collaboration among the companies in the consortium, the track ballast tamper simulator was installed with four work posts, i.e. driver, process controller, tamper and instructor in the same simulator. The result is a working environment based on collaboration.


The aim of the project has been to design and implement an instruction and training platform for new and recycled railway maintenance staff to give them quality training in track maintenance work on a ballast tamper. Workers can train how to respond in normal situations and track faults or machine breakdowns.


The purpose of the training with this simulator is to guarantee safety for every workgroup and improve their performance under quality standards for high-speed lines and short night work times before the track is opened. Students do exercises in work procedures ranging from starting up the machine to ending the day’s work, identifying different track faults and solving different types of breakdowns.



Care has been taken to make the simulator intuitive and easy to use. Each simulation post includes a visual interface to interact with the local controls of the machine and a view that shows the track from the corresponding perspective. In the tamper post, the simulator includes the actual pedals used to move the tampers.


Owing to the wide variety of ballast tampers on the market, the model is generic and focuses on the most interesting features for staff training. Within the generic lines, a precision model has been developed to combine a wide array of work configurations and operations with all their versatility. As a result, the simulator can be used for the manual correction of task parameters and the calculations made by the on-board computer. The tamper post includes options for connecting the satellite and multiple tamper, regulating working pressure and tampering times, configuring each measurement system, completing operations independently and many other parameters that affect the end result. Similarly, the driver post includes all the main controls. The project includes the modelling of a real section of track and the actual worksheets provided to workers.



The simulator is also connected to a virtual tutor that assesses the student’s progress to reinforce weaknesses. The exercises are easy to configure and include documents to help the instructor design and follow the exercises.


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