MEDYNA was developed within a research program ''Limits of the wheel-rail system'' which was sponsored by the German governement. There was a pressure on german railways and railway industry to develop a vehicle which could compete with the already running Shinkansen in Japan, the TGV in France and the APT which was under development in England. The result of the research program itself was not directly the ICE-train shown on the left but a vehicle called RSVD which stands for ''Wheel-rail experimental and demonstration vehicle'' or in German ''Rad-Schiene Versuchs- und Demonstrationsfahrzeug''.
The development of the hardware for the new high speed train was one aim of the research program. Another aim was to develop a computer program based on existing theoretical knowledge but without the restrictions of existing software.
For the second aim the research program ''Algorithm and design tools for the calculation in advance of optimal designs of railway vehicles'' was launched. The german title is given also in the picture on the left, which is the title sheet of the final report, published in 1985. In this research project different companies and research institutions had been working together. This included companies producing railway vehicles as:
· Krauss Maffei, a producer of locomotives,
· MBB which was producing coaches, better known for its aeroplanes,
· Thyssen Henschel producing also locomotives and
· Waggon Union a producer of coaches.
On the other side there had been research institutions as:
· DLR, Institute of robotic and system dynamics,
· MAN Neue Technologie with a departement doing research in vehicle
· dynamics, active control systems, wear of printing machinery a.s.o and
· TU-Berlin, with the institute named aerospace and space technologie.
This mixture came together because of the knowledge about vehicle design and vehicle testing on producers side and about dynamics in general on side of aerospace research institutions. The leadership had MAN Neue Technologie, Prof. Meinke in Munic.
The general goal for the computer program was to develop a system capable to simulate nearly every design railway engineers might think off.