Oncron wins special award for innovation in rail traffic optimization

Oncron has been recognized with a special award at the CNA Innovation Price 2026 for our Light Simulation Engine and Prediction of Rail Traffic.

The award was presented by Bavarian Minister of State Christian Bernreiter, Bavarian State Ministry for Housing, Building and Transport, during the CNA InnovationsPreis ceremony.

For us, this is an important recognition of a new approach to one of rail’s most persistent operational challenges: making complex traffic developments predictable enough to support better, delay saving decisions in live operations.

Recognized by experts across rail, mobility and technology

CNA e.V. has been promoting innovation in mobility, transport and logistics for decades. Together with Cluster BahnTechnik Bayern and Logistik Initiative Bayern, it awards the annual InnovationsPreis to companies, start-ups, universities, research institutions and other organizations developing particularly innovative products, technologies and services.

The submissions are assessed by an interdisciplinary jury bringing together expertise from railway technology, logistics, supply chain management, artificial intelligence, mobility, transport infrastructure and academia, alongside experienced industry and association leaders.

This breadth is particularly relevant to Oncron as we sit at the intersection of railway operations, simulation, data and AI.

The strength of this year’s field further underlines the significance of the recognition. Other organizations recognized at the 2026 InnovationsPreis included well-known names such as Fraunhofer, Siemens, and ZEISS, alongside further innovators from industry and research.

A different approach to rail traffic simulation

Rail traffic is highly interconnected. A delay, conflict or operational decision in one part of the network can affect many other trains and locations. Understanding these dependencies is essential to preventing delays from propagating across the network.

Traditional railway simulations can represent operations in great detail, but that detail also requires considerable modelling effort and computational resources. This makes them highly valuable for planning, but less suited to continuously evaluating changing operational situations in real time.

Oncron takes a different approach.

Our Light Simulation Engine represents railway operations in a graph-native model. Instead of recreating every physical movement of every train in microscopic detail, it uses real and historical traffic information to model the relationships between train events and predict how movements, conflicts and delay chains will develop.

This allows future traffic situations to be evaluated quickly and creates the foundation for comparing alternative operational decisions.

And prediction is only part of the objective.

By combining lightweight simulation with AI-based optimization, Oncron is developing decision support that helps dispatchers and train controllers understand the network-wide consequences of different actions and identify decisions that reduce delay propagation.

Making better use of the railway network we already have

Rail networks are under increasing pressure to carry more traffic while improving punctuality and reliability. New infrastructure is essential, but it is expensive and takes years to deliver. Using existing infrastructure more effectively can create meaningful improvements much sooner and at significantly lower cost.

This is where we see the potential of operational data, lightweight simulation and AI: giving railway decision-makers a clearer view of what is likely to happen next and which actions can improve the outcome.

Our goal is straightforward: help railways reduce delays, improve operational resilience and make better use of existing network capacity.

We congratulate all other winners and award recipients of the CNA InnovationsPreis 2026 and thank CNA e.V., Cluster BahnTechnik Bayern and Logistik Initiative Bayern for the recognition and for bringing together such a strong community around the future of mobility.