Paulo F. Teixeira

Paulo F. Teixeira, Ph.D. in Civil engineering, is an Assistant Professor at Instituto Superior Técnico, where since 2005 he is responsible for railway engineering and rail transport courses of the different M.Sc. Degrees in the Civil Engineering Department. From 2004 to 2008 he was also the head of the Railway Division of the Center for Innovation in Transport (CENIT) of the Technical University of Catalonia (UPC). He has been member of several railway scientific committees and expert groups, such as the UIC High-Speed Committee, EURNEX Pole Infrastructure and the Railway Experts Council of the Spanish Railway Foundation. He has authored more than 70 papers in railway engineering (over 20 in SCI journals) and has supervised 9 Ph.D. theses, and over 25 M.Sc. dissertations. He led and participated in several research projects, funded by the EU, the Spanish, and the Portuguese government. He has also worked as a consultant of different railway entities and administrations in the areas of track design, track maintenance and asset management, life cycle cost modelling, and infrastructure pricing.

Patricia Ferreira

Patrícia Ferreira is an Assistant Professor at Instituto Superior Técnico, teaching courses about transportation and transportation infrastructure, since 2001. She has an M.Sc. in Structural Engineering (with her thesis focusing on Structural Dynamics) and a PhD in Railway Engineering, about dynamic modeling of the train/track system at very high speeds. Since 2002 she has been participating as researcher in national and European research projects (EURNEX, BITURAIL, MODURAIL), and she has worked as a consultant of the Portuguese High Speed Railway Administration (RAVE). She is an author of 15 papers on railway engineering (among Conferences and SCI journal papers), mainly related to track design and train-track dynamic modelling.

Frederico Francisco

Frederico is a Physicist with a background in Aerospace Engineering. Besides his ongoing research work related to Spacecraft Trajectory Anomalies in the context of tests to General Relativity that led to his PhD thesis, Frederico has maintained a connection to Railgroup.pt for several years. Starting in 2009, he participated in the project to develop a Decision Support Model for the Prediciton of Maintenance and Renewal Needs on the Portuguese Railway Infrastructure Network for REFER, the Portuguese Infrastructure Manager. In 2015 he resumed a stronger connection to this group, working on the project CAPACITY4RAIL, specifically, in the context of its SP5 which aims to assess the impact of different technologies being developed to improve the European rail network capacity.

Pedro Rodrigues

Pedro is working in the field of track geometry degration and is in the early stages of his Ph.D. He graduated from Instituto Superior Técnico (IST), where he obtained an integrated M.Sc. degree in Civil Engineering, during which he also participated in the MODURAIL research project. He then joined the MIT Portugal Ph.D. Program in Transportation Systems, also at IST, where he is researching the degradation of track geometry, concentrating on the emergence and development of local defects.

Rui Maciel

Rui is working on the verification and validation of dynamic train-track interaction models and on the application of structural optimization techniques in the field of railway engineering. He holds an Integrated M.Sc. degree in Civil Engineering (specializing in structures) from Instituto Superior Técnico, where he graduated with a thesis on design and implementation of Finite Element Method models for 3D solid analysis. His research interests are in the field of computational mechanics, with a particular focus on the development of dynamic train-track interaction models based on finite element methods for structural dynamics problems, model reduction techniques and structural optimization. Rui has been working since 2014 with Prof. Patricia Ferreira in the Dynavoie project and the Capacity4Rail project, sub-projects SP1 and SP5.

Samuel Matias

Samuel is currenlty working on his Ph.D. in the area of railway track systems. He has recently finished his master's thesis, under the supervision of Prof. Patrícia Ferreira. The thesis was about predicting the structural behavior of slab track systems for design purposes with special focus on the Stedef configuration through 3-D finite element models, which are developed with proper validation through experimental campaigns. With these models, a static comparison is performed between the Stedef slab track and the ballasted track, as well as a parametric study to various parameters of the slab track in order to optimize its design. A structural behavior comparison between the Stedef, Rheda 2000, and Bögl slab tracks is performed, and their response to platform stiffness variations is evaluated.

Joana Cunha

After recently finishing her M.Sc. thesis at IST, Joana has worked on a research project Charge4Rail, which researched infrastructure charges. She is currently working on a research project Capacity4Rail.

João Loff

João Loff has an M.Sc. in Information Systems and Computer Engineering at IST. He has been working within Railgroup.pt since 2011 as a programmer on the development of the software application MODURAIL.pt, a Railway Track Maintenance Decision Support System.

Aleksandr Prodan

After recently completing his Ph.D. in Transportation Systems with the MIT Portugal Program at IST, Alex is continuing his involvement with the group as a post-doc researcher, working on projects such as Charge4Rail and Capacity4Rail. His interests include issues related to vertical separation of infrastructure and operations in railways, and infrastructure charges and costs. Born in Ukraine, he spent most of his life living in and around San Francisco. After completing several transportation-related internships in and around San Francisco, and getting his B.S. in Computational Engineering Science from University of California, Berkeley, he worked for two years as a transportation engineer and then moved to Portugal to study railways. He earned his M.Sc. Degree in Complex Transportation Infrastructure Systems from the MIT Portugal Program at the Instituto Superior Técnico in Lisbon, Portugal, his M.Sc. thesis is titled Infrastructure pricing models for new high-speed railway corridors in Europe: Pricing model development for the Lisbon-Madrid High-Speed line. His Ph.D. thesis was defended in 2016 also at the MIT Portugal program. It is titled “Infrastructure Access Charges in Vertically-Separated Railway Systems Contributions to the Development of a Decision Support Model.” Alex now works for a Canadian consulting company CPCS Transcom.

Francisco Furtado

Francisco completed is Ph.D. in Transportation Systems in June 2016. His Ph.D. thesis is titled Freight Rail Productivity Bottlenecks and Improvements Evaluation on a Network Scale from an Operational Costs Perspective. The research included developing an original application which is able to identify, measure the impacts and assist in the selection of improvements that are then evaluated incorporating the effects of uncertainty on their expected net present values. In order to do this the application implemented in Java combines a range of techniques that include linear programming, integer programming, heuristics and Monte Carlo simulation. Francisco also has an M.Sc. integrated from the MIT Portugal Program from IST, with a thesis titled Agent Based Modeling Applied to Railways Capacity Evaluation: the Entroncamento - Pampilhosa - Vilar Formoso Corridor. Francisco previously had experience as a civil engineer in planning and management of major civil construction projects, including transport infrastructure.

Rui Santos

Rui completed his Ph.D. in Transportation Systems at Instituto Superior Técnico in September 2015. His work is titled Planning and Scheduling Models towards Efficient Heavy Maintenance of the Railway Track and proposes a decision rules model and optimal-based models to undertake the task of track geometry correction, performed by heavy machines. By balancing the operational costs of the machines and an adequate track quality, it was possible to find enhanced maintenance solutions based on the frequency of full traverses of a line in the same work direction. Results showed higher use rates for the machines in a daily context and reductions in the annual maintenance cost compared with current practices. In December 2014, Rui joined Tata Steel UK Rail Consultancy as a Senior Transport Planner.

João Ribeiro

João Ribeiro is has an MSc in Civil Engineering from Instituto Superior Tecnico, specializing in railway engineering. His M.Sc. thesis subject was supervised by Prof. Patrícia Ferreira and Prof. P.F. Teixeira and focused on modeling of the effects of track vertical stiffness variations on track degradation, a work inolving data from the Swedish Railways with the collaboration of EBER Dynamics (Dr. Eric Berggren). After completing his MSc dissertation João joined the Capacity4Rail (C4R) project, and is currently involved in sub-project SP5.

Rui Dantas

Rui Dantas has an M.Sc. in Civil Engineering from Instituto Superior Técnico specializing in railway engineering. During his thesis he worked on the implementation of an Asset Management System within the Modurail.pt platform. After graduating, he worked as a researcher on the Capacity4Rail project were he helped develop an Asset Management Life Cycle Cost model for rail track superstructure, which optimizes maintenance by calculates the costs with Maintenance and Renewal operations and scheduling these accordingly. His work was supervised by Prof. Paulo F. Teixeira. In March 2015, Rui joined Mota-Engil Ferrovias where he worked on Project Management of Railway Renewal, Rehabilitation and Maintenance within different projects in Portugal and Malawi.

Luis Filipe Caetano

Luis completed his PhD in Transportation Systems in February 2016. His PhD thesis is titled Optimisation of railway track maintenance and renewal operations. From 2009 to 2013, he was involved in several research projects that focused on the development of a computerised decision support system to plan railway track maintenance and renewal operations. During his time with Railgroup, Luis worked on a number of research projects: Biturail, Modurail, and REFER's asset management system. Luis joined FORCE Technology Norway as a consultant in Asset Integrity Management.

Tiago Moço Ferreira

Tiago completed his Ph.D. in the area of railway substructure design in July 2015. After obtaining an integrated M.Sc. degree in Civil Engineering at Instituto Superior Técnico, with his thesis titled Influence of incorporating a bituminous sub-ballast layer on the deformations of railway trackbed, he entered the Ph.D. program in Transportation Systems, also at IST, to study the design of railway track substructure, particularly modelling its long term thermo-hydro-mechanical behaviour due to traffic and environmental actions. During his doctoral program he also obtained an advanced specialization diploma in Transportation Systems and participated in several national and European research projects. While with Railgroup, Tiago worked on Biturail and Modurail. Tiago has joined SENER in Spain.

António Andrade

António completed his Ph.D. in Transportation Systems in April 2014. His Ph.D. thesis is titled Prediction and optimization of maintenance and renewal actions related to rail track geometry. He also has a M.Sc. from IST in Civil Engineering, with his thesis titled Renewal decisions from a Life-cycle Cost (LCC) Perspective in Railway Infrastructure: an integrative approach using separate LCC models for rail and ballast components. While with Railgroup.pt, António has also contributed to the REFER asset management system as well as the Modurail project. In March 2014, António has joined the Institute of Railway Research of the University of Huddersfield (UK) as a Research Fellow. Since then he has worked at ISCTE and has since joined IST as an Assitant Professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering.

Diogo Valente

Diogo has an MSc. in Civil Engineering from Instituto Superior Técnico specializing in railway engineering. His thesis was completed as part of the MODURAIL project and was about rail degradation (case study of the Portuguese Railway Network). Diogo joined Mota-Engil Ferrovias in 2014. After working on the Nacala Corridor renewal prpoject in Mozambique, he is now working on permanent maintenance and is responsible for ultrasonic rail inspection of this heavy haul freight corridor.

Amelia Areias

Amélia Areias worked in different research projects under the supervision of Prof. Paulo Teixeira from 2006 to 2009, in both Lisbon and Barcelona. She completed her M.Sc. Thesis in 2007 on “Design of railway high speed tracks with granular and bituminous layers using elastic-plastic finite element models.” Since then, Amélia has worked at the Portuguese National Funding Agency for Science, Research and Technology (FCT), at the European Parliament, and at the Directorate General for Transport and Mobility of the European Commission. Currently she works at Alstom as authorisation and certification manager for rail signalling systems.

Diana Alves Pereira

Diana contributed to the REFER asset management project.

Diogo Victória

Diogo's thesis examines the possibility of constructing the new Lisbon-Porto high-speed line, using a phased approach. This thesis uses a railway simulation tool, OpenTrack, to evaluate the performance of the new network, when a new high-speed line segment is added in parallel, alongside the existing conventional line. After simulating operations, the work will evaluate compatibility of the new line and the existing network, as well as the impact of the added capacity and improvement in travel time. Diogo's work is supervised by Prof. Paulo F. Teixeira. In 2012, Diogo attended an intensive "Railway Logistics Performance" course in Newcastle, UK in 2012, and, as a result, co-authored a paper in the Journal of Transport Literature.

João Brazão

During his time with the group, João contributed to the REFER asset management project, MODURAIL, and InfraCharges 2012.

Jorge Frade

Jorge contributed to the REFER asset management project as a lead software developer for the REFERIST tool.

Alexandre Almeida

Alexandre was a programmer for the MODURAIL.pt tool and a database analyst.

Edgar Santos

Edgar contributed to the development of the MODURAIL.pt tool as a programmer.

Johnny Aldeia

Johnny contributed to the development of the REFER-IST project as a database analyst.

Juan Gonzalez

Juan contributed to the development of the REFER-IST project as a mathematician and a database analyst.

Bernardo Freire

Bernardo contributed to data analysis of track geometry and track degradation for the REFER-IST project.

Thomas da Mota

Thomas contributed to data analysis of track geometry and track degradation for the REFER-IST project.

Miguel Miranda

Miguel contributed to data analysis of track geometry and track degradation for the REFER-IST project.

Gonçalo Santos

Gonçalo contributed to data analysis of track geometry and track degradation for the REFER-IST project.

Ana Rita Lynce

Ana Rita contributed to the Innotrack project.