The Jakarta-Bandung High Speed Railway, which connects Jakarta, the capital of Indonesia, and Bandung, a famous tourist city, was officially opened on October 2.
The 142,3-kilometer-long line, which is one of the symbol projects of the Belt and Road Initiative and the cooperation between China and Indonesia, reduced the train journey time between Jakarta and Bandung from more than 3 hours to approximately 40 minutes.
Ai Bo, Dean of the Faculty of Electronics and Information Engineering at Beijing Jiaotong University, said, “The Jakarta-Bandung High-Speed Railway will facilitate transportation between Indonesia's major cities and promote economic development and employment along the railway line. "This is extremely important for the Indonesian people," he said.
Beijing Jiaotong University, Chinese technology company ZTE, China Railway Design Corporation, Bandung Institute of Technology, Braunschweig Technical University, University of Birmingham and other domestic and foreign enterprises and cooperated with institutions.
The international science and technology cooperation project titled “Research and Pilot Application of Mobile Communication Network Theory and Technology for High-Speed Railways in Indonesia” was jointly carried out under the leadership of Ai.
Explaining his team's work in his office at Beijing Jiaotong University, Ai said, "The communication system ensures the safe operation of the train operation control system, which you can think of as the brain of the train."
Ai, “High-speed railways; “Train operation control requires dedicated communications networks to transmit safety-related information such as traffic clearance, train speed and location,” he added.
The most critical point in mobile communication is the transmission and detection of electromagnetic waves. Geographic and environmental factors such as topography and climate affect the transmission channel or path of electromagnetic waves. For example, landforms such as tropical rainforests along the railway line can affect the channel.
Taking into account the local terrain and operating frequency bands specific to Indonesia, Ai led the research team to develop a high-performance ray tracing simulation platform focused on channel simulator and parallel computing.
For years, faculty and students of Beijing Jiaotong University have traveled along the Jakarta-Bandung High-Speed Railway route, using radio channel simulators and ray-tracing toolboxes to emit and track electromagnetic beams. They collected signal data that could be used to reconstruct the railway environment and establish a suitable local channel model.
Once the new channel model was created, it had to be evaluated and validated using software and algorithms to ensure the accuracy of the model in high-speed rail application. Therefore, the research team created a simulation validation platform.
“This platform can simulate the operating environment of high-speed trains with speeds reaching up to 500 kilometers per hour, frequencies exceeding 100 GHz and having over 1.000 antenna arrays,” Ai said. "It combines physical elements by better imitating real-world conditions and enables trains to operate safely in a real environment," he said.
Ai noted that through this high-speed rail project, a group of local technology talents interested in research and development in Indonesia have been trained, thus promoting employment and providing intellectual support for the local economy.
The project has also created a solid cooperation platform for scientific research and talent training between China and Indonesia.
During the project, more than 20 lecturers and students from Bandung Institute of Technology visited Beijing Jiaotong University for training and interaction. The two universities jointly educated four students at the master's or doctoral level, jointly organized many international academic seminars and published more than 10 high-level research articles.
Source: Xinhua