New position open at the Chair of Infrastructure Management!
The Chair of Infrastructure Management lead by Professor Dr. Bryan T.
Adey in the Institute of Construction and Infrastructure Management
(IBI) of the Department of Civil, Environmental and Geomatic Engineering
(D-BAUG), has an opening for a researcher focused on data and process
analysis to enable digitalized railway operations.
Scientific Assistant in the Optimization of Rail System Development Processes
Project background
Safe and efficient railway systems traditionally rely on centralised control and human-in-the-loop monitoring of its moving parts. However, this requires large amounts of resources for the network operation. Operators, responsible for implementing system developments based on innovative technologies to improve operational efficiency, must adhere to safety requirements for scalable and well-documented solutions to acquire regulatory approval. This requires consideration of approximately 50-80 interconnected documents for a development of a new system, depending on the complexity of the technology. Over the long-duration development process, adjustments to the solution may be necessary. Accordingly, changes to the interdependent documentation to ensure ongoing compliance with safety requirements would also be necessary. Any changes can trigger cascading effects throughout the entire project, potentially increasing costs and delaying development, ultimately slowing down innovation within the railway system.
A new ETH project “ProCargo”, co-funded by the Swiss Federal Railways via the ETH Mobility Initiative, will assess the ability to improve processes for rail system development to unleash efficiency gains, with specific examples for the cargo sector. The optimal exploitation of digital tools in system development processes facilitates an effective and efficient process. To effectively capitalise on the existing knowledge base, digital tools, e.g., large language models, can be leveraged to learn from system developers’ documentation, then assist the system developers and finally propose modifications to the system developers. This will support digital planners in optimally providing anoverview of interdependencies and ensuring the coherence between the documents, while assuring a safe rail system. This will benefit system developers in a more streamlined development process, and society as a whole due to the earlier implementation of safe system developments and their earlier effects.
Within this project, ETH Zurich identifies potential process changes and preliminarily assesses the possible benefits related to integrating digital tools and the related procedural changes to facilitate a streamlined uptake of innovative system developments.
For more information about the position and the application process, please see:
The Infrastructure Management Group mission is to improve the construction and management of infrastructure. For more information visit our webpage