Recordings of the FOSDEM Railways and Open Transport devroom available
09 February 2024
For the second time, team members of the OpenRail Association have coordinated the Railways and Open Transport devroom at FOSDEM. For this 4-hours track we chose 10 presentations by experts with diverse backgrounds from the large amount of submissions.
While most talks at FOSDEM circulated around programming, cloud, or system administration topics, we experienced an overwhelming interest in railways and transportation. Our devroom was constantly overcrowded with around 100 participants, with many interested people still standing outside who couldn’t get in the room any more.
How Open Source is being used from planning to operations
The talks in the devroom were following a consistent story: we started with a primer into the open standards and open data that powers the sector. We then looked at data to model passenger data, followed by simulations and building timetables. Afterwards, we’ve seen examples how all this information is being used in the day-to-day operations in companies and community projects. Via the respective links you can find the video recording and slides of each talk, so please enjoy these great presentations:
| Title | Speaker | Link |
|---|---|---|
| Opening Railways and Open Transport devroom | Max Mehl, Cornelius Schumacher, Simon Clavier, Loic Hamelin, Peter Keller | Abstract and video |
| Open standards, open data, open-source tools: their governance and future | Tu-Tho Thai, Brede Dammen | Abstract and video |
| Rust-transit: libraries to manage transit data in rust | Tristram Gräbener | Abstract and video |
| Counting on openness: Privacy-safe passenger counting | Henri Seijo | Abstract and video |
| MATSim at SBB: Using and contributing to the open-source transport simulation for advanced passenger demand modeling | Joschka Bischoff | Abstract and video |
| Bending geographic maps for enhanced railway space-time diagrams | Alexis Jacomy | Abstract and video |
| MARECO algorithm: how to drive a train using the least amount of energy | Alex Rolland | Abstract and video |
| Railway signaling: detecting conflicts in a complex world | Younes Khoudli | Abstract and video |
| How we at Deutsche Bahn develop IoT use cases quickly and cost-effectively | Holger Koch | Abstract and video |
| Transportr: the Past, the Present and the Future | Mikolai Gütschow | Abstract and video |
| Software needs of a volunteer operated heritage railway | Nils Pickert | Abstract and video |
About FOSDEM
FOSDEM is Europe’s largest gathering of Free and Open Source Software developers and enthusiasts with almost 8000+ participants each year. It took place on the weekend of 3 and 4 February 2024 in Brussels at the ULB university. It was a perfect opportunity for the wider OpenRail community to get to know each other, learn and connect as the audience is developers and enthusiasts of Open Source. This includes a good number of railway fans and people active in related communities.
