Towards Safe Localisation for Railways: Results from the EGNSS
MATE Project

Safe train positioning is a key technology to make rail transportation more efficient and cost effective. Within the EGNSS MATE project, the project partners SBB, DLR and IABG researched the use of European Global Satellite Navigation Systems for this application.
The main contributions are the development of a novel map-based sensor fusion algorithm, the development of a test catalogue for jamming and spoofing cyberthreats and the collection of a large and rich data set for testing and validation. The dataset includes over 200 hours of data sensor and ground truth data, covering most of the Swiss normal gauge network. In addition, tests were conducted to assess the impact of jamming and spoofing attacks. Results show promising performance of the algorithms on most of the lines, excluding some long tunnels and sections with heavy multipath. The findings of the project results will help to introduce safe train positioning into ETCS by boosting the development and standardisation efforts.