Crisis room, network work and predictive maintenance... How SNCF Réseau is preparing for the 2024 Olympics

“It's been 4 years since all our projects were scheduled to be ready for the Olympic Games,” says Séverine Lepère, Île-de-France general manager of SNCF Réseau, welcoming the fact that 120 days before the opening ceremony “delivery commitments are fully met”. No less than a thousand projects are carried out every night “all over the network” for which she is responsible, she underlines, citing the replacement of tracks on the RER D, the reliability of an electrical power center at Bercy or the renewal of 43 switches near the Gare du Nord. “The largest ever made in Europe”, according to SNCF Réseau. So many small, medium and very large projects that mobilize all of the group's teams, on deck to help make these Games “the very first 100% accessible by public transport”.

And to achieve this, SNCF Réseau has spared no expense. Firstly by carrying out projects that are constrained in terms of timetable, since everything must be finished before summer, but also in terms of space, to the extent that the work undertaken, sometimes only at night or on weekends, does not must not prevent the smooth functioning of everyday public transport during the day. In total, no less than 800 million euros per year have been invested in the Ile-de-France network - up to 840 million euros in 2023 - for the "regeneration" of infrastructure, deemed "essential to maintain a high level of performance ". A level of investment “which doubled between 2015 and 2018, and which has remained high since,” emphasizes SNCF Réseau, according to which this “makes up for 30 years of underinvestment generated by an all-TGV policy.”

All with the objective of “halving the intervention time” on incidents. “Where we have carried out massive regeneration operations, the level of network reliability has improved,” SNCF Réseau boasts. And the figures speak for themselves: on line H, between 2020 and 2023, the number of incidents linked to the track has decreased by 35%, on the RER B Nord, since 2021, the number of incidents has been divided by three.

But if the investments appear to be commensurate with the event, they will undoubtedly not be enough to prevent the breakdowns and other hazards that the network experiences throughout the year. Incidents - the most serious of them - which will be spotted and taken care of by the crisis room at Gare du Nord, open from 7 a.m. to midnight throughout the event and "all night in the event of an incident serious,” we assure. There, the most important decisions are taken concerning the circulation of trains on the entire Paris Nord network, with the capacity to stop them, even divert them or for example “to cut off traffic underground” at the Gare du Nord. and decide to “make them come to the surface”. “From this room, we will be able to communicate with all the signal stations and the intervention teams pre-positioned in the field and make decisions if ever there is a problem,” explains Séverine Lepère.

Knowing that “three major measures” have been planned, listed by the Director General: the establishment of operational command centers throughout the period of the Olympic Games, the deployment of operational teams prepositioned throughout the field and equipped with equipment and tools necessary for immediate intervention and the organization of full-scale training exercises. In total, 70 operations of this type will be organized between now and June, including an RER B evacuation exercise in the Paris Nord tunnel in partnership with the RATP or a fire simulation in the RER C involving the RATP, the Paris police headquarters, the Paris Fire Brigade and the Samu, among others. A real “athlete training”, quips the owner of the place, who assures that her agents are preparing “to live to the rhythm of the different sporting events”.

In addition, SNCF Réseau did not hesitate to use artificial intelligence, banking on “predictive maintenance” to prevent breakdowns before they occur and thus avoid a certain number of slowdowns or even more serious incidents. Concretely, this involves remote monitoring of the infrastructure using sensors which send signals to the supervision center, explains the group, which emphasizes that this device thus makes it possible to “intervene before the incident occurs” but also “to significantly reduce intervention and diagnosis times”. In the network supervision center, physically installed at the Gare du Nord but responsible for monitoring the smooth movement of trains over a geographical area extended over 5 regions, agents are responsible for this monitoring 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. role ? “Use artificial intelligence to detect weak signals” and thus intervene before the arrival of a potential breakdown, and “trigger” the maintenance teams present on the ground “in the event of an alarm”.

And the results of this system deployed since 2014 but perfectly operational for a year are already there. In 2023, it would have made it possible to avoid 36 incidents on the Ile-de-France network, according to Olivier Dubrulle, head of the railway “assets” department and responsible for the system in Île-de-France. And everything is accelerating in view of the Olympics: “We went from 3,200 measurement points in 2022 to more than 5,000 today and we continue to deploy them between now and the Games to have 5,500,” he hopes. he, evoking “a real rise in power over the last 18 months”. With the ambition to focus efforts on the lines that will be used the most during the Olympics, and “already today, users are benefiting from the progress that we have made on this occasion”, adds Nicolas Ignate, the head of the center network supervision. Before promising: “But that’s not the end of the story, we’re going to maintain this pace beyond the Olympics.” This is the whole point of this global event: to offer these new technologies to users “as a legacy” so that they can benefit from quality public transport on a daily basis.