Alcatel has been awarded a global contract valued at approximately $250 million by Mitsubishi Heavy Industries (MHI) to supply, integrate and deploy its driverless train control and telecommunication systems for the Dubai Metro in the United Arab Emirates. MHI is part of the DURL Consortium — Dubai Rapid Link — headed by MHI, which is in charge of the Dubai Light Rail Transit Project for the municipality.
With a goal of becoming the region’s prime business and leisure destination, this project enables Dubai to overcome severe traffic congestion issues. The Municipality of Dubai’s requirement is to move passengers efficiently and reliably with advanced, proven train control technology and to ensure real-time communication to passengers in stations and on-board. The objective of the new metro, consisting initially of two lines and scheduled to go into revenue service in 2009, is a 16,000 people per hour per direction capacity for the Red Line and 7,400 for the Green Line, by 2015. When completed, at a total of over 70 km, this will become the longest driverless metro in the world.
The Dubai Municipality will benefit from low operating and maintenance costs, optimal life cycle costs and proven driverless technology inherent with Alcatel’s SelTrac technology. The train control solution incorporates moving-block technology, pioneered by Alcatel, which eliminates the need for signals on tracks while providing safe, close headway of shorter trains for an optimized service frequency. Alcatel’s NetTrac central control system facilitates operator flexibility to add or delete trains and overcomes problem occurrences. Alcatel will deliver, through its SelTrac S40 communications-based train control system, a fully automated operation.
The Dubai Municipality and their passengers will also take advantage of Alcatel’s fully integrated communications solution, which includes a digital and wireless network, a security solution including on-board video surveillance and access control, voice system, digital radio network, passenger information, public address, time distribution and an integrated control center. Alcatel will provide its total solution on a turnkey basis with a complete set of services including design, integration, installation, testing and commissioning.
