UIC and railML.org held a joint conference about their current, common developments.

RailTopoModel, a universal model for representing rail infrastructure data, was published as an International Railway Solution (IRS30100) in April 2016. Its core consists of an accurate, flexible representation of the railway network topology. RailTopoModel is now being extended to represent successive states of infrastructure projects, including planning alternatives, while remaining consistent and avoiding redundancies. Yearly releases of IRS30100 are expected, with intermediate “beta” versions becoming freely available online for early user feedback.

railML®3 State of development (alpha release) was presented, which incorporates the topology concepts developed under RailTopoModel. As usual, railML® development is based on use cases presented by the user community, and progressively incorporates the features already present under railML®2.3. All railML® versions are available for download from the railML.org website. RailVIVID, a free, simple toolbox for visualising and validating railML files, is updated at the same time.

Particular focus was put on the single tool for simultaneous development of RailTopoModel and railML®3, in order to ensure simultaneous releases of RailTopoModel versions and of matching railML®3 versions.

RailTopoModel is expected to become a most adequate backbone for rail infrastructure-related BIM (Building Information Modeling), and railML®3 the matching, xml-based data exchange format. UIC and the railML.org community are now seeking as much user or tester involvement as possible, in order to make these solutions future-proof.