ESTAS
ESTAS “Évaluation des Systèmes de Transport Automatisés et de leur Sécurité” designs models, tools and methods to support the evolution of guided transport systems. Its main objective is twofold: on the one hand, to facilitate and refine safety analyses of critical functions of these systems, focusing on their compliance with rail regulations and their operational safety, and secondly, to optimize their performance and efficiency using operational research and artificial intelligence techniques. Targeted research, one of ESTAS’s strong points, is based on the synergy between engineering, applied research and feedback from expert appraisal activities and technical assistance activities in the field of guided transport systems.
In fact, the research teams benefit from a concrete vision of practices and concerns in the field, in the context of real operations. What’s more, this operational feedback highlights specific needs and challenges that will be resolved through applied research.
Our work covers 3 major complementary areas of activity: research, expertise, and international cooperation, and is based on methods from automation, production engineering, artificial intelligence, operations research, applied mathematics, and computer science. They aim to evaluate operational safety and risk management by integrating human and organizational factors along with modeling and simulation approaches. Given ESTAS’s specific characteristics (research/expertise), our actions focus on the safe and efficient operation of guided transport systems. These three themes are detailed in the following pages:
The laboratory has two experimental platforms: