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In recent years, automated design has gained traction as an attractive means of helping engineers expand their design capabilities, while driving down costs. While often derided as an overly bureaucratic and indecisive organisation, Network Rail – which owns and runs the UK's railway infrastructure – has, in this instance, made a step in the right direction.

In fact, Network Rail has little choice but to innovate as it looks to meet expanding capacity demands. Passenger numbers on UK rail services are forecast to double in the next 25 years. In that period, rail franchises will be expected to undergo infrastructure changes that will require more sophisticated design methods.

There is great potential for savings to be made, too. According to the Office of Rail and Road, design costs hit £3.4bn in 2016/17. The utilisation of computers for mechanical design – especially generative design – could lead to improved performance across the industry.

In their brief, competition entrants were told to consider the UK railway as “a system of systems” spanning power and control methods, pedestrian flow and train services. These exist within a number of complex track systems and substructures, including earthworks, bridges and tunnels.

It is hoped that generative design tools could offer improved long-term predictions of railway performance, reducing franchising risks while also attracting more private sector investment. Network Rail also believes the move to automated infrastructure design could lead to safer, higher-capacity operations with lower overheads.

Of the above, participants were asked to address two specific capability needs in their project proposals. They had to be able to predict future railway service capability in the long term, and “to assist in the preparation of design options to save time and optimise designs by better balancing complex interacting factors”.

The winning entries have been announced, with the four victors all sharing a slice of a £300,000 grant that will go towards their projects.

Construction and engineering firm Costain was selected for its Rail: Automated Infrastructure Design – R:AID project. It's a toolkit which, according to the group’s rails sector director Ian Parker, will involve “a data-centric infrastructure design process that will improve the efficiency of rail systems in a safe and transparent way”.

Midlands-based aerospace engineering outfit Graffica was chosen for its infrastructure design and evaluation framework project, which is set to look into how existing tools can be integrated to use data coming from specialist railway tools and other third-party sources.

PEAN Technologies, which classes itself as an ‘ICT systems integrator’, is developing a toolkit to generate and automatically adjust track layouts so as to be clash-free. Elsewhere, Plume Rail will look to develop a solution around automated traction power simulation and design.

Free to last six months to one year, projects must finish by 31 March 2020, with total costs falling between £50,000 and £200,000. According to Network Rail and Innovate UK, successful solutions “could have applications in wider infrastructure and urban planning applications”.