Smarter Maintenance
Switching from Dates to Data Optimising maintenance and operational costs is one of the biggest challenges facing the railway industry. With thousands of assets and employees for operators to manage, the careful allocation of time and resources is critical
Condition monitoring The main objective of this strategy is periodically learning about the condition of assets and preventing unplanned shutdowns. The frequency of these planned interventions is normally based on maintenance and operational experience and equipment vendor’s advice. Although this method works and provides a safe environment for trackside workers, it is expensive, incurs costs and requires the time of employees that could be deployed elsewhere, even when it’s not necessary.
January 2022
Outside of planned maintenance, companies also pay a great price when they cannot manage unplanned shutdowns. Research shows that companies worldwide could be saving as much as £125 million per year, as well as reducing delays for customers, if they could avoid unplanned failures. The top contributors to delays to passenger journeys are external causes, such as weather and power failure or signalling failures.
“
Maintenance workers are able to take only the necessary equipment to perform the repair, which saves both time and cost
“
C
orrective maintenance was, and still is, the first maintenance strategy implemented by many industries. This strategy takes a run-to-failure approach that involves waiting until a failure occurs to repair the equipment or component. Although rare, some rail infrastructure companies still take this approach to their maintenance strategy. Traditionally, scheduled maintenance programmes are how the rail industry has approached keeping networks running. This strategy involves planned interruptions, with fixed intervals in between, for specific asset types.
The case, therefore, for alternative ways to manage maintenance on Britain’s railways is clear and, in recent years, operators have been moving towards a condition-monitoring approach. This uses a system to continually monitor the health of thousands of assets on a given network, presenting a number of opportunities for operators to improve efficiency and reduce costs.
62
Smart maintenance can be used to mitigate many contributors to unreliability and the benefits of a more intelligent, predictive fault monitoring system can be beneficial to a wide range of stakeholders. By understanding and proactively managing the rate at which the assets on a network degrade, it is possible to ensure that passengers experience fewer delays and cancellations due to equipment failures, operators minimise any fines from rail regulators for delays, and the amount of trackside work required is reduced, which frees up operations staff to focus on other tasks.
New techniques With the introduction of remote condition monitoring (RCM) techniques, it is possible to retrieve information about the status of thousands of railway assets, ranging from axle counters to point machines and track circuits. This facilitates more flexible, time-based maintenance strategies and gives the opportunity to learn how the asset is behaving over the course of time. Armed with this information, infrastructure owners can identify imminent failures and act prior to their occurrence.
railbusinessdaily.com