The aim of Digital Infrastructure Information is to provide all relevant stakeholders with an up-to-date and complete description of the railway infrastructure. This includes the first and last mile information as provided in the Rail Facilities Portal, a clear definition of the points used for data exchange as contained in the TAF/TAP TSI ‘Primary Location Codes’ (CRD), the network overview used in several business applications and an overview of the lines (RINF - Register of Infrastructure). Up to now, the data have been and are maintained in different areas in different levels of quality. This regularly leads to different coding for one and the same element such as a location. For the business systems and information exchange, the IMs have converted their systems to the TAF/TAP TSI codes for primary locations (PLCs). As a result, most data exchange and central systems have been migrated in recent years to be compliant with PLCs. The same digital infrastructure information is used from planning to operation.

One consequence of having multiple infrastructure reference databases is that they all have to be maintained separately, which reduces efficiency. The future goal is to simplify this situation for the benefit of IMs and the sector by rationalising the number of infrastructure databases while maintaining all functions and containing the most complete and accurate description of the rail network that is highly reliable, automatically updated and can be used by the whole sector and accessed by its systems. The goal by 2023 is to merge most of the current systems and create a concept of how to link information, especially in RINF and CRD.

Deliverables completed in 2021/22:

• Feasibility Study on European Reference Files
• Concept for aligning existing sector applications dealing with reference files (CRD, CIP and RFP)
• Aligning existing sector applications dealing with reference files (CRD, CIP and RFP) in the Rail Information System (RIS)
• Concept on whether and how data from RINF can be used for business purposes

Outlook 2023-25:

• Merging the CRD, CIP and RFP data into the Railway Infrastructure System (RIS) while using RINF data as much as possible
• Motivating IMs to provide proper data quality into the RINF
• Developing a concept for merging/linking locations for information exchange (PLC) and locations used for describing the infrastructure
• Elaboration of a scenario of collaboration between ERA and RNE (IMs) in the field of the Digital Infrastructure Information
• Concept for providing one data space for rail topology data including an up-to-date description of the infrastructure as well as first and last mile