The transport world needs to address challenges as climate change, for environmental protection, or
urbanisation. The Pods4Rail project, funded by Europe’s rail (ERJU) aims at promoting sustainable
and flexible solutions for transporting people and goods. Its goal is to promote a concept for a door-
to-door transport chain based on rail.
The proposed system integrates the concept of intermodality with a digitalised, decentralised
mobility service and multimodal interfaces to different transport modes.
The railway-based intermodal pod system (figure 1) will be a new kind of mobility system composed
of pods and specific carrier units. It will be a-based rail transport, using railway infrastructure in
combination with other modes of transport, like road or ropeway. This will improve the quality of life
in urban and rural areas and contribute to a more sustainable and efficient future of mobility.
A Pods localisation Is a required input for various applications: traffic management, Pods tracking and
passenger information. As for many land transport applications, the use of a GNSS receiver is a cheap
and basic equipment. However, it is well-known that GNSS signal reception faces many degradations
due to masking obstacles, multipath or signal interferences that is reducing its performance and its
usability.
The Pods vehicle will travel in various types of environments: open sky areas, urban canyons, areas
with trees and bridges. All will disturb performance in different ways. Moreover, the Pods will be
carried by different transport modes, each of them following a different dynamic behaviour.
The paper will introduce the concept of context-aware localisation and present comparative studies
of state-of-the-art approaches for context detection.
Considering the environmental constraints and dynamic of each Pods, we will investigate an adaptive
positioning solution relying, as a first step, on the context and behaviour detection.