Dr. Alfredo Núñez Vicencio - News

January, 2025, IAM4RAIL project is now half a way, two years of activities, work and very nice experiences. Just gratitude to colleagues and all team, I have learned a lot. Here some memories of the various meetings we had had in the past years.

November, 2024, Siwarak Unsiwilai defended his PhD thesis "Railway track support condition assessment: from onboard measurement to maintenance decision support".

October, 2024, Taniya Kapoor defended her PhD thesis "Physics-informed machine learning: from methods to beam structures".

July-August, 2024, Jose Stradi and Wessel Roodenburg defended their MSc theses "A digital twin approach for cross-border maintenance operations" and "Rail infrastructure quality monitoring through smartphone accelerometer measurements". They were amazing students in the MSc of Civil Engineering, and it was an honor to work with them in their graduation. They both worked with ProRail in the framework of IAM4RAIL project.

June, 2024, I attended the IEEE WCCI in Yokohama and had the chance to meet old friends and to have short chats with super interesting people like Hisao Ishibuchi, Marios Polycarpou, Marley Vellasco, Igor Škrjanc and Pablo Estevez.

4 December, 2023, Yuanchen Zeng defended his PhD thesis "Monitoring dynamic properties of railway tracks using train-borne vibrometer measurement".

28 September, 2023, Karim El Laham defended his PDEng "A big data methodology for tamping decisions using sensors from the sky, railway track, and substructure".

28 June, 2023, Marko Kapetanovic defended his PhD thesis "Improving sustainability of regional railway services".

December, 2022, we are very happy to participate in the project IAM4RAIL, which is a European Project part of the ERJU projects in the Horizon Europe framework. TUDelft is affiliated partner of ProRail, and we will focus on development of adhesion management solutions, on-board monitoring and maintenance strategies and development of embankment stability tools.

December 7, 2022, Pan Zhang defended his PhD thesis "Mechanisms and mitigation of short pitch rail corrugation".

September 20, 2022, Jianfeng Fu defended his PhD thesis "Failure prevention and restoration in power systems".

December 16, 2020, I presented our work on multiobjective optimization for railway maintenance in regional railways, at the 2020 Big Data Conference organized by the University of Delaware. The video of the presentation is next here:

December 4, 2019, Hongrui Wang defended his PhD thesis "Data-based Dynamic Condition Assesment of Railway Catenaries".

September 3, 2019, Ali Jamshidi defended his PhD thesis "Intelligent rail maintenance decision support system using KPIs".

November, 2018, I am a visiting scholar at the University of California, Berkeley for three months. Funded by the H2020 project RISEN. I had the chance to interact with many colleagues, in the photo with Prof. Carlos Daganzo.

October 19, 2018, I'm very happy to officially have concluded all my tenure track related agreements. Since November 2018, I'm assistant professor (universiteit docent) in the topic "Data-based maintenance for railway infrastructure".

September 28, 2018, we are very happy to have organized a memorable CM2018 11th International Conference on Contact Mechanics and Wear of Rail/Wheel Systems, 24-27 September 2018. In the Youtube Channel CM2018-TUDelft you can see presentations that were video recorded.

July 8, 2018, I am attending and participating at the IEEE World Congress on Computational Intelligence, IEEE WCCI 2018, 2018 Congress on Evolutionary Computation (IEEE CEC 2018), Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, 8-13 July, 2018. I had the chance to meet Paul Werbos, thanks to him we can train neural networks using backpropagation.

May 24, 2018, the final conference of the H2020 project NeTIRail-INFRA was held in Ljubljana, Slovenia. TUDelft participated mainly in two task: in WP2 with research about short pitch corrugation and in WP4 with research about deployment of ABA measurements using trains in operation. Here the links to the two presentations I did: (WP2 Corrugation), (WP4 ABA in Romania). You can find more videos about the project in the Youtube channel: NeTIRail-INFRA Youtube Channel. Overview of WP4 Monitoring and smart technology can be seen here WP4 NeTIRail-INFRA, and a summary of our tested ABA system in Romania here WP4 ABA.

22 October- 1 November, 2017, we have conducted a succesfull measurement campaign for the project NeTIRail-INFRA in the test rig of AFER near Faurei (link AFER). We managed to measure the condition of the rails on board and track side, with speeds up to 220km/h. Here you can find some photos and videos:

July 10-18, 2017, I attended the First International Conference on Rail Transportation (ICRT2017), Chengdu, China. I gave three presentations. July 14th, I gave a colloquium at the School of Electrical Engineering, Southwest Jiaotong University, Chengdu, China, invited by Prof. Zhigang Liu, here a link. July 18th, I gave a colloquium at the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Hong Kong, invited by Prof. Ni Yiqing. Here a link.

March 31, 2017, I gave the seminar "Rail condition monitoring in The Netherlands: A Big Data problem" (in Spanish), Seminario ISCI, Universidad de Chile, Chile.

January 28, 2015, The H2020 Project "Needs Tailored Interoperable Railway" (NeTIRail-INFRA) has reached the stage of preparation of grant agreement. Call H2020-MG-2014 Two Stages, Topic MG-2.1-2014 - I2I - Intelligent Infrastructure. Duration: Jun. 2015 - Jun. 2018. Consortium: The University of Sheffield (Project leader, UK), University of Leeds (UK), International Union of Railways - UIC (France), ADS-Electronics Research (Romania), Romanian Railway Authority - AFER (Romania), Delft University of Technology (The Netherlands), Albert-Ludwigs University Freiburg ALU-FR (Germany), IFSTTAR (France), TCDD (Turkey), INTADER (Turkey), VTI (Sweden), SZ-Infrastruktura (Slovenia), RCCF (Romania).