PHOENIX 2027

PHOENIX is the first international workshop uniting the entire railway community around one defining challenge of our time: railway resilience. As railways face mounting pressures from climate change, ageing infrastructure, growing demand, cyber threats, and unexpected disruptions, PHOENIX breaks traditional silos by bringing together researchers, practitioners, infrastructure managers, operators, manufacturers, and policymakers under a single system-engineering framework. Covering the full railway ecosystem – from infrastructure and rolling stock to operations, digital technologies, safety, and asset management – the workshop advances the science and engineering of resilient, safe, reliable, and sustainable railway systems, fostering the interdisciplinary collaboration needed to shape the future of rail transport.

© BBS

Contributions based on analytical, computational, experimental, and empirical methods are welcome, including mathematical modelling, systems engineering, optimization, simulation, digital twins, artificial intelligence, machine learning, data analytics, reliability and risk analysis, network science, operations research, condition monitoring, predictive maintenance, formal methods, laboratory experiments, and real-world case studies.

Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

• Railway resilience and climate adaptation
• Infrastructure, components and asset management
• Railway capacity, operations, and traffic management under disruptions
• Incorporating resilience into planning of railways systems
• Safety, security, reliability and availability
• Risk assessment and resilience assessment
• Digital railways, AI and automation
• Monitoring, diagnostics and predictive maintenance
• Rolling stock and railway systems engineering
• Transferring resilience concepts from other domains to railways
• Resilience engineering for safety-critical railway systems
• Cyber-physical resilience in railway systems

Workshop Organizers

• Prof. Nikola Besinovic, TU Dresden, Chair of Railway Operations.
• Dr.-Ing. Christopher Szymula, TU Dresden, Chair of Railway Operations.

Workshop Program Committee

• Nikola Besinovic (TU Dresden, Germany)
• Christopher Szymula (TU Dresden, Germany)
• Oded Cats (TU Delft, The Netherlands)
• Eric Jenelius (KTH, Sweden)
• Anthony Chen (Hong Cong Polytechnic University)
• Xuesong Zhou (Arizona State University, USA)
• Shuguang Zhan (Heifei University, China)
• Yihui Wang (TU Dresden, Germany)
• Travis Waller (TU Dresden, Germany)
• Norman Weik (TUM, Germany)
• Teodor Crainic (University of Quebec in Montreal, Canada)
• Emma Frejinger (University of Montreal, Canada)

(more to be confirmed)

Important Dates

(In accordance with RSSRail2027’s schedule: RSSRail 2027 - Proceedings & Dates)

Short paper / abstract submission

All researchers, academics, practitioners, and students working on the conference themes are invited to participate to PHOENIX submitting either a short paper (8 pages, including front matter and references) or an abstract (max 2000 characters, spaces included). For PHOENIX, Short papers are for both scientific and industrial contributions. Please use the official Word template provided by the conference.

Submit your abstract/paper via the official RSSRail submission system and select the “PHOENIX” option: RSSRail 2027 - Submission Types