How can rail freight transport be transformed according to Industry 5.0 principles?

The tRail5.0 project aims to integrate the principles of human-centricity, resilience and sustainability into the European rail ecosystem. On 8 September, the Horizon Europe project tRail5.0 (Driving the Digital Transformation of the European Rail Ecosystem Towards Industry 5.0) successfully held its kick-off meeting. Funded by Europe’s Rail, the initiative aims to develop comprehensive recommendations and a measurable reference framework to guide the transformation of the rail freight industry towards a human-centric, sustainable and resilient model. tRail5.0 will support the future of rail freight transport by establishing a common framework to measure the impact of innovation on safety, reliability and efficiency. The project will help translate technological advances and workforce engagement into tangible operational improvements for the sector. The Atlantic Corridor, one of Europe’s key freight routes, will serve as the project’s validation use case. Connecting major ports on the Iberian Peninsula with destinations in France, Germany and Ireland, the corridor provides an ideal environment for identifying the challenges of cross-border rail freight transport and developing solutions that can be replicated across Europe. The project consortium brings together an interdisciplinary team comprising the coordinator INESC TEC (Portugal), Zaragoza Logistics Center – ZLC (Spain) and Université Gustave Eiffel – UGE (France), combining scientific and operational expertise in systems engineering, logistics, transport economics and social sciences. The research will assess how human teams interact with emerging Industry 5.0 technologies, including artificial intelligence, digital twins, prescriptive maintenance and collaborative robotics, among others. During the kick-off meeting, the three partners, together with representatives from Europe’s Rail, defined the qualitative and quantitative methodologies that will guide the project throughout its 30-month duration. The tRail5.0 initiative, which began in September 2026 and will run until February 2029, has received a total EU grant of €598,793.00.