High-Speed Railways in Spain

Control Headquarters

In Zaragoza, midway on the journey from Madrid to Barcelona, one room’s walls are lined with large panels that glow red, green, and blue against a black background. Marks representing trains blip as they move along luminescent tracks, their position constantly updated as they speed along real-world tracks many miles away. “We have a geographical view of the entire system, all the trains, as if we were seeing the whole system operating in real time,” says Javier Rivilla, project manager at Indra.

This is the control center for the entire AVE system, a complicated network of track sensors, signaling technology, radio transmitters, and computer systems that integrates every possible bit of information about the trains and the rail system and updates all that information either in real time or within a few seconds. Its developers like to boast that this system is among the most advanced in the world. “We’re in charge here of making sure that everything functions perfectly,” says Rivilla.

The company that synthesizes all the information is Indra, one of the top Spanish information systems companies and a top provider of defense contracts in that field. Internationally, Indra is also particularly well known for its air traffic control systems. “Of every five flights in the world, three are controlled by Indra,” says Rivilla.

Indra engineers developed the new system starting in 2001 as a partnership with ADIF, while ADIF, searching for a more advanced method of traffic control and information flow, took advantage of the Spanish company’s history of innovation in the development of information systems. The new system, called DaVinci, began operations in 2003. With more than four million lines of code, the system integrates all relevant information into a unified platform and automates all tasks related to the technical structure of the system, so the operator can focus on traffic flow.

High-speed rail, like air traffic, demands high-precision information gathering and transmission. Not only does the control center collect data on exactly where each train is at any given moment, but other types of information prove crucial to the functioning of the entire system, such as data from detectors that test the temperatures of the brake boxes so as to avoid overheating and thus a brake failure. The system also collects information on the  electricity demand in any part of the line. In addition, fiber-optic sensor systems detect even small fallen objects along rail paths and then sound an alarm to avoid harm.

Of course, throughout the years of high-speed rail around the world, any control system has needed to be able to identify fallen objects, to detect the position of the trains, to determine whether the trains are functioning as they should. In the past, however, each piece of information was determined, received, and transmitted by a separate system. For instance, if a train had to change rails because of a problem along a track, the operator had to contact all other operators in charge of related systems, such as the operator of that particular station. “What ADIF wanted was for someone in charge at the moment to be able to make a few clicks on a keyboard, change the path of the train, and everyone would immediately be notified, with all relevant changes in the system automatically updated,” says Rivilla.

All those systems have been totally integrated, which operators say is the particular strength of the Indra system. There are also redundant systems built in, in case one fails. Indra has taken advantage of technological advances in sensors and has developed proprietary information systems, coordinating the entire system on the Internet to provide maximum ease of use.

For the future, newer, more accurate signaling systems will allow higher train speeds along high-speed rail tracks. This will increase the productivity of the entire rail system, but it will also demand increasingly precise data and transmission of that data. Says Rivilla, “As we begin to increase rail speed, I believe we will keep on innovating and advancing within this system, making everything even easier to coordinate and even more automatic.”