To develop more sustainable transportation systems, societies worldwide are making efforts to increase the share of rail in transporting people and goods. Europe, for example, aims to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and become climate neutral by 2050. To this end, the European Green Deal, a set of policy initiatives by the European Commission, aims to cut emissions while improving people’s well-being. Recognizing that the transport sector represents 25 percent of the world’s emissions, rolling out cleaner, cheaper, and healthier forms of private and public transportation is an important part of the European Green Deal.
Recognizing the need to gradually replace GSM-R with the modern technology, the UIC has decided to lay the foundations of the Future Railway Mobile Communication System (FRMCS), of which the main goal is to fully digitalize railway operations, support an increasing level of automatic train operations (ATO), and embrace the possibilities offered by 5G without creating a railway specific cellular network technology. Besides these basic goals, FRMCS aims to be cost effective and future-proof, interoperable, and allow seamless migration of GSM-R to FRMCS. To meet these requirements, there are multiple challenges, which are being tackled with FRMCS standardization. This white paper discusses the challenges and opportunities of becoming successful in deploying 5G-enabled FRMCS for the digitalization of railway operations.
