BNSF and ALTRIOS: Open-source digital twin helps make rail-world investment decisions

By SUSAN GREEN
Staff Writer

A new freight locomotive can cost up to $6 million, depending on its onboard technologies and capabilities. With an average lifespan of around 30 years, the investments railroads make in locomotives are significant and will only grow with increasing demand for freight rail.

Given the costs and life expectancies of locomotives and other rail infrastructure, freight railroads need a trusted tool to evaluate how new technologies, including hybrid, electric, biofuel and hydrogen locomotives, among others, will perform. Railroads need to understand how new equipment and technology will interact with legacy systems and operate in freight terminals before they invest.

That’s the solution that ALTRIOS, which BNSF helped develop, provides.

ALTRIOS (Advanced Locomotive Technology and Rail Infrastructure Optimization System) is the world’s first validated, open-source digital twin for the freight rail system of today as well as for future technologies. With ALTRIOS simulations, planners can watch trains, fleets, networks, energy sources and costs in real-world scenarios, and see how strategies play out over decades.

As companies work toward carbon reduction and decarbonization targets, ALTRIOS enables researchers to evaluate which clean energy technologies can help railroads achieve their targets while minimizing operational costs and scheduling impacts.

ALTRIOS was developed jointly by the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Laboratory of the Rockies (NLR), BNSF Railway, Southwest Research Institute (SwRI), the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, and the University of Texas at Austin.

NLR’s mission is to research ways to advance new energy materials and technologies that lower costs, boost the economy, strengthen security and deliver abundant and reliable energy. BNSF and SwRI operational data were used to validate ALTRIOS.

“Our involvement in developing ALTRIOS demonstrated BNSF’s leadership in innovation and sustainability,” said Mike Swaney, BNSF’s director of enterprise efficiency and asset productivity. “Our collaboration on this project strengthened BNSF’s ties with major research institutions performing cutting-edge work in the advanced energy innovation space.”

R&D World magazine recently presented NLR and its other development partners with an R&D 100 Award for ALTRIOS. The system also received a second honor: a Special Recognition Award (silver) for Corporate Social Responsibility. Given annually, the R&D 100 Awards are chosen by an independent panel of judges and honor the 100 most innovative technologies of the past year.

“Winning this award validates the importance of a platform like ALTRIOS,” said Swaney. He added that because of BNSF’s involvement, we’ve developed a strong working relationship with the NLR and have been asked to serve as advisors on subsequent projects at the NLR and other U.S. Department of Energy laboratories.

ALTRIOS is one more example of how BNSF is advancing innovation for the entire industry and helping find greener, sustainable solutions. That’s what we call winning.