Ricerc@Sapienza

Bogies are key subsystems for rolling stock safety and, therefore, meaningful and objective data concerning their condition is of paramount importance for railway operation. These subsystems experience severe service conditions causing wear, damage and degradation of components and affecting the vibrations to which the passengers are exposed. As such, safe and reliable operation, together with a high level of comfort for the passengers, can only be assured by an in-depth, data-based and comprehensive maintenance of the bogie components.

The railway track system is a crucial infrastructure for the transportation of people and goods in modern societies. With the increase in railway traffic, the availability of the track for monitoring and maintenance purposes is becoming significantly reduced. Therefore, continuous non-destructive monitoring tools for track diagnoses take on even greater importance.

The structural health monitoring (SHM) of an infrastructure is of fundamental importance for the structure and people safety. Fiber Bragg Grating (FBG) sensors allow to design for each application, a tailored array of quasi-distributed sensors integrated to the infrastructure. To ensure the structural integrity of the railways is crucial to verify that the infrastructures comply with safety requirements to carry out their task.

“Bioregion”, a term coined by Peter Berg in 1977, was improved by Alberto Magnaghi, who defined it as the space for developing new relationships of coexistence between the inhabitants-producers and the territory of a region. Therefore, bioregion is a tool for rethinking regional planning, no longer as the sum of different sectorial planning exercises but as a “transdisciplinary planning” approach that considers all of a territory’s aspects. This approach is related to EU policies for Integrated Coastal Zone Management (ICZM) and the protection of maritime and coastal areas.

The regularity is a key performance in the operation of a metro service, because it is normally affecting a large set of secondary performances: e.g. punctuality, energy efficiency, economic efficiency and vehicles availability. Human behaviours are affecting the regularity, by introducing deviations between panned and actual times in various operational phases of metro services: e.g. dwelling times, acceleration/deceleration times, inversion times at terminus, headways themselves.

Global warming and climate change are indisputable theories. Since the Industrial
Revolution, the mean temperature of the planet has increased by 1°C. Now, temperatures
are approaching a higher stage of +1.5°C and the attention is on both CO2 emissions and
energy consumption. Transportation is a major component of the environmental impact,
accounting for approximately 30% of air pollution and energy consumption. Due to the
rapid urbanization in the EU, with an estimated 74.3% of the population living in cities,