Dipartimento di Ingegneria Civile Edile e Ambientale

Riccardo V. Licciardello graduated in mechanical engineering (specialisation: transport system technology) with honours in 1998, with a thesis comparing two commercial multi-body softwares for rail vehicle dynamics. After a brief collaboration with the railway industry, he went on to take his Ph.D. in Railway Engineering in 2002, with a thesis involving the design, implementation and field tests of an innovative on-board wheel-rail contact force measurement system. In the following years, whilst continuing his vehicle-track interaction studies as a researcher at SAPIENZA University, he lectured in Transport Sciences and Economy (2003-2009) and in Vehicle Dynamics (2004-2009), then in Transport Safety (2010-2012), and became a consultant for Italy's Ministry of Transport as railway expert (2004-2011), where he worked on rail safety, railway worker health&safety, monitoring of signalling and operations on Italy's new high-speed lines. With SAPIENZA he started championing EU projects, and in the years 2006-2009 he contributed in setting up the three TrioTRAIN projects, AeroTRAIN, DynoTRAIN and PantoTRAIN, in which he became WP Leader of the WP delivering the project outputs to the standardisation/regulatory bodies (2009-2013). He was involved in a number of impact assessment and other railway-related studies for the EC (2006-2013), addressing rail noise abatement, rail access legislation, rail safety, single-wagon-load transport. In 2011 he was called by the Law Court of Lucca as railway expert to support the enquiry on the tragic Viareggio accident of 2009. In 2012 he was co-founder, and became Technical Director, of DITS, a spin-off company of SAPIENZA, where he has worked on, among other topics, vehicle-track interaction, noise and vibrations, freight operations and shunting. In 2016 he took on the role of Quality Assurance Manager of DITS ending 2022. He is a member of the editorial board of the Journal of Rail and Rapid Transit (SAGE Publishers) and of the organising committees of the conferences “Railways” and "SEF" (railway safety and operations). In recent years, with SAPIENZA he has been involved in projects on track geometry for freight terminals, conceptual modelling of rail freight operations, and European projects on rail thermal stress and Traffic Management System issues (IN2RAIL), testing of the European Train Control System ETCS (VITE), next generation of running gear (RUN2Rail), simulation of rail yards and the interacting network (OptiYard), European regulations (TSI) to place in service overhead contact lines (S2R-PantOCL), innovations in axlebox journal bearings (GEARBODIES). In the first half of 2022, he joined ANSFISA, the road/rail national safety authority in Italy, from which he is on leave and now leading for SAPIENZA the freight innovation work package and the on-boarding condition monitoring task of the Italian National Centre for Sustainable Mobility's (MOST) railway spoke n. 4.