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Hitachi Rail and Hyperloop Transportation Technologies (HyperloopTT) announced on Thursday that they completed the proof of concept for cloud based ERTMS (European Rail Traffic Management System). signalling system for HyperloopTT’s capsules, achieving a key milestone in the high-speed transport system’s pathway to commercial operations.
Bringing signalling logics into the cloud has created a more reliable, sustainable and long-lasting system for capsules that will travel as fast as planes at speeds of up to 1,200km/hour, the companies said in a joint statement.
Working from Hitachi Rail’s site in Naples, Italy, the partnership has created a digital simulator that allows for the integrated testing of the traffic management, the signalling and some of the physical safety requirements of the hyperloop system and is now developing an interface with HTT’s simulators for functional integration, the statement said.
It said ERTMS has the benefit of being used and recognised internationally, making it highly interoperable, thereby allowing HyperloopTT systems to operate safely across the world without the need to create new standards.
According to the statement, the next step in the process would be to digitally integrate both the signalling infrastructure and the cloud-based model for the physical capsules, which would open the door to moving to physical testing of the whole system at HyperloopTT’s test track in Toulouse.
Hitachi Rail announced its technology partnership with HyperloopTT in December 2020 with the objective to integrate hyperloop’s capsule traveling system with Hitachi Rail’s ERTMS.
(Writing by SA Kader; Editing by Anoop Menon)
