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RAILWAYS 2026
The Seventh International Conference on
Railway Technology: Research, Development and Maintenance
incorporating:
STECH 2026
The Eleventh International Symposium on
Speed-up and Sustainable Technology
for Railway and Maglev Systems
23 - 26 August 2026
Budapest, Hungary
IL 1: “Ballast and Sub-ballast under Cyclic Loading: Advances in Evaluation and AI-Driven Prediction”
Professor António Gomes Correia
Department of Civil Engineering, Institute for Sustainability and Innovation in Structural Engineering (ISISE), University of Minho, Portugal
Bio Sketch:
António Gomes Correia holds a Civil Engineering degree from the Instituto Superior Técnico (1977), a Doctor-Engineer degree from the École Nationale des Ponts et Chaussées (1985), and Habilitation from IST (1998). He is widely recognized as a pioneer and key figure in establishing Transportation Geotechnics as a recognized engineering field, with over 600 publications on geotechnics and transport infrastructures, including recent advances in digitalization and AI-based modelling.
Awarded the Manuel Rocha Prize (1987), he became a specialist at LNEC. He served as Full Professor at the University of Minho (2003–2020), where he was Vice-Dean of the School of Engineering and Director of the PhD Program in Civil Engineering. Since 2021, he is Emeritus Professor.
Internationally, he played a leading role within the ISSMGE, chairing TC 202 – Transportation Geotechnics and contributing to its global consolidation. He founded the Transportation Geotechnics conference series and serves as founding editor of Transportation Geotechnics and Editor-in-Chief of Transportation Engineering. He has delivered prestigious invited lectures, including the Manuel Rocha Lecture, the Proctor Lecture (ISSMGE TC202), the Šuklje Lecture, and the Széchy Memorial Lecture.
IL 2: “Numerical Investigation of Ballast Grain Characteristics on the Lateral Resistance of Railway Tracks using Discrete Element Method (DEM)”
Dr Qing Wu
Centre for Railway Engineering, Central Queensland University, Australia
Bio Sketch:
Dr. Qing Wu is a Principal Research Fellow at Central Queensland University Australia. He is also the Mechanical Discipline Leader and a Principal Research Fellow at the Centre for Railway Engineering. His research interests include intelligent railway systems, parallel computing, multi-objective optimization, dynamics control, mechanical system dynamics and their applications in railway vehicles.
Dr. Wu is also the recipient of an Australian Research Council DECRA fellowship (2020-2023) funded by the Australian Government and the recipient of an Advance Queensland Industry Research Fellowship funded by Queensland Government (2024-2027).
IL 3: “Curving Performance Enhancement in Link-Type Steering Bogies: Concepts and Applications in Japan)”
Professor Yohei Michitsuji
Ibaraki University, Japan
Bio Sketch:
Yohei Michitsuji is a Professor of Mechanical Systems Engineering at Ibaraki University, Japan. His research focuses on railway vehicle dynamics, particularly wheel–rail contact mechanics, curving performance, and steering bogie systems. He has been actively involved in collaborative research with Japanese railway operators and industry partners, contributing to the development and practical implementation of advanced bogie technologies. His recent work emphasizes asymmetric and single-axle steering concepts, aiming to achieve both improved curving performance and mechanical simplicity. His research integrates theoretical analysis, numerical simulation, field measurements, and condition monitoring in commercial railway operations.
IL 4: “AI and Automation in Railway Inspection and Maintenance”
Professor Guoqing Jing
Beijing Jiaotong University, China
Bio Sketch:
Professor Jing has been working on railway engineering structure and maintenance over 20 years. He has served as principal investigator over 50 research projects with grants received from NSFC, CRC, CREC, CRCC, CCCC, with 100+ SCI papers and 4500 citations. Prof. Jing was invited as chief consultant for railway projects in Mexico, Iran, Russia HSR and Kenya, and worked part-time as ISO, China railway standard committee members. Prof. Jing was ranked top 2% civil engineering researchers by Elsevier in 2022-2025.
IL 5: “Experimental and Numerical Study of the Thermal Behaviour in Tread Braked Wheels: Recent Developments”
Professor Nicolò Zampieri
Politecnico di Torino, Italy
Bio Sketch:
Nicolò Zampieri is an Associate Professor in the Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at Politecnico di Torino. He received his PhD in 2014 with a dissertation on the development of monitoring systems for railway applications. His research focuses on railway vehicle dynamics and monitoring, wheel-rail and roller contact modelling, wear, and rolling contact fatigue (RCF). His current work centers on the design of test benches for railway applications and the development of advanced solutions for vehicle monitoring. Since 2020, his research has primarily addressed the simulation and experimental analysis of the thermal behaviour of tread-braked wheels and brake shoes. In this context, he coordinated the design and construction of a dedicated scaled twin-disc device, now installed at the Politecnico di Torino railway laboratory. More recently, he has been exploring digital twin approaches integrating longitudinal train dynamics with multibody simulations. He is the principal investigator of the AI4FREIGHT project, carried out in collaboration with Wabtec Group and funded by the Italian Ministry for Universities and Research. He has authored more than 70 scientific publications.
IL 6: “Inverse estimation of catenary geometry from pantograph interaction forces”
Professor Manuel Tur
Institute of Mechanical Engineering and Biomechanics, Universitat Politecnica de Valencia, Spain
Bio Sketch:
Manuel Tur obtained his Ph.D. in Computational Mechanics in 2008 from the Universitat Politècnica de València (UPV), receiving the institution’s Best Ph.D. Award. He has been a Professor in the Department of Mechanical and Materials Engineering at UPV since 2009 and has served as Director of the Institute of Mechanics and Biomechanics since 2020.
His research activities encompass contact mechanics, finite element simulation based on medical imaging, real-time dynamic simulation, and hardware-in-the-loop testing. In recent years, he has led and contributed to research projects and industrial collaborations focused on pantograph testing and the dynamic simulation of its interaction with the overhead line.
IL 7: “How Large Language Models and AI Agents Can Already Support Railway Asset Management?”
Professor Hongrui Wang
Southwest Jiaotong University,China
Bio Sketch:
Prof. Hongrui Wang received his PhD degree from the Section of Railway Engineering, Delft University of Technology, the Netherlands, in 2019. He continued his academic career at TU Delft as a Postdoctoral Researcher until November 2020, and subsequently as an Assistant Professor in the same section. He is currently a Professor at the School of Electrical Engineering, Southwest Jiaotong University, China. His research lies at the interface between artificial intelligence and railway systems. He develops AI techniques that incorporate and leverage existing knowledge of railway system dynamics and engineering principles to solve real-world problems in structural health monitoring, lifecycle asset management and data-driven modelling and design. His work is particularly focused on applications in railway traction systems and the pantograph-catenary interface.
Prof. Wang is a Senior Member of IEEE and serves as a Senior Area Editor for IEEE Transactions on Instrumentation and Measurement. He is also an editorial board member of Intelligent Transportation Infrastructure. His research has been supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China, Europe’s Rail Joint Undertaking and industry-funded projects. He has received the Outstanding Associate Editor Award from IEEE TIM and the Best PhD Thesis Award from the European Rail Research Advisory Council (ERRAC).
IL 8: “On the Aerodynamics of Freight Trains: Crosswind Stability, Slipstream Effects and Tunnel Overpressure”
Dr Gisella Tomasini
Department of Mechanical Engineering, Politecnico di Milano, Italy
Bio Sketch:
Gisella Tomasini received her PhD in Applied Mechanics in 2005. She has been an Associate Professor since January 2018.
She is the author or co-author of 160 scientific publications, including 45 papers published in peer-reviewed international journals. She has served as Principal Investigator or Supervisor for six projects funded through competitive research grants and has been responsible for more than 40 testing and research projects funded by public and private companies, including Alstom, Hitachi Rail, CRRC, CAF, Lucchini, Italcertifer S.p.A., RFI, and Mercitalia.
Her research activity is mainly focused on the aerodynamics of rail and road vehicles, with particular focus on crosswind effects, as well as on monitoring and diagnostic systems and algorithms for railway vehicles, energy harvesting systems and smart sensors, fluid–structure interaction in buildings, and vibration and noise reduction.
She is currently teaching Automation and Mechatronics (in the six-year degree course in Medicine and Biomedical Engineering), as well as Fundamentals of Theoretical and Applied Mechanics and Applied Mechanics in Bachelor’s degree courses.
She has supervised more than 45 Master’s thesis students, has supervised/is currently supervising a total of 8 PhD students.
IL 9: “Pushing the Limits: Challenges for High-Speed Magnetically Suspended Vehicles"
Dr Karel van Dalen
Delft University of Technology, The Netherlands
Bio Sketch:
Karel van Dalen is an Associate Professor in the group of Dynamics of Solids & Structures at the Faculty of Civil Engineering of TU Delft, The Netherlands. He leads and contributes to research projects into
• interaction between magnetically suspended vehicles and flexible infrastructure at high speeds
• the dynamics of railway-track transition zones
• employing nonlinearity for low-frequency ground-vibration mitigation
• developing tools for characterization of dynamic soil properties at small and larger strains
Karel van Dalen graduated from the Faculty of Civil Engineering at TU Delft in 2006, with a thesis on moving-load dynamics. He received a Ph.D. degree in 2011 for his research focussed on acoustic characterization of porous media, performed in the group of Applied Geophysics and Petrophysics, also at TU Delft. He also worked in that group as a postdoctoral researcher in the field of seismic interferometry. He was appointed as Assistant Professor in 2013 in the group of Dynamics of Solids & Structures, and has worked on the above-listed topics since then.
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