5 minute read
World first for Willow
Digitalisation and Design
BHP has partnered with Willow to implement a digital twin of its heavy haul network in Western Australia.
Digital twins transforming heavy haul freight in Australia
The concept of digital twins is not new, but now – in an Australian first – it’s gone from just a buzzword to reality, with the application being used for BHP’s heavy haul freight in WA’s Pilbara.
The demands on rail are great, with rail owners needing to have their finger on the pulse across a complex array of data and market forces.
As expectations increase, there is pressure on owners to take advantage of new technologies, to ensure infrastructure networks can perform at their full potential. But with new forms of automation and mechanisation come added complexity, with millions of new connected devices added to infrastructure networks every day.
There’s an abundance of data that rail owners are required to manage, from train cycle times to the effects of speed restrictions and understanding where the root cause defects are coming from within rolling stock and the track infrastructure.
However, much of this information exists in independent systems creating siloed data that is not easily shared – a major pain point.
It can be the norm for most rail owners to be dealing with multiple separate enterprisegrade software systems for asset management and maintenance. Each comes with its own interface and data protocol.
In this environment, decision-makers are left to connect the dots on their own, often making critical judgements based on incomplete information and manual reports.
Improving network availability and cycle time throughout networks is a key imperative, especially for heavy haul owners. To make operations more flexible to respond to market demands, owners need accurate, real-time performance insights, so they can identify and resolve, for example, speed restrictions and defects quickly.
Enter WillowTwin for Rail, a powerful software platform developed from deep knowledge in operating and maintaining railway networks.
WillowTwin for Rail centralises and structures information from rail systems, to create a ‘digital twin” — a digital replica of a rail network. By aggregating live, static and spatial data, the platform provides a single source of truth to undertake smart asset management functions.
WillowTwin for Rail integrates with a multitude of widely used rail operating and maintenance systems, creating an open protocol and agnostic tool.
Built by rail engineers, the platform sets a new standard of railway asset management and maintenance across heavy haul, light rail, metro and passenger rail networks.
As Willow Head of Australia, Daniel Kalnins explains: “We connect subject matter experts with the right software expertise, so we can predict where the failures will be on the railway network.” Kalnins said the benefits of WillowTwin for Rail include: • The ability to view an entire rail network in a single platform. • Increased overall track availability and throughput of production. • Live data on asset condition, availability, and performance against historical data to derive actionable insights. • Reduction in maintenance costs, Temporary
Speed Restrictions (TSRs), average time between failures and unplanned downtime.
“In our partnerships with global railway owners, operators and maintainers, we’ve demonstrated that with WillowTwin we can improve network availability, safety and reliability, all while lowering maintenance costs,” Kalnins said.
PROOF IN THE PILBARA
In a global first, world-leading resources company BHP has partnered with Willow to implement a digital twin of its heavy haul network in Western Australia.
This case study was presented jointly at the recent AusRail PLUS conference, titled Enabling the transformation of heavy haul rail through digital twin technology with BHP as part of the Rail Freight and Heavy Haul stream.
“The challenge for BHP, like many owners, is that they faced managing a sea of fragmented technology vendors, each with their own language and interface,” Kalnins said.
“This environment restricts clear data for real-time decisions and automation, making reporting on critical issues such as performance or maintenance effectiveness more difficult.”
WillowTwin For Rail provides a single source of truth for the network, enabling BHP to better visualise asset information, enable more contextual and effective decisionmaking and effectively enable more problem solvers across its team.
During BHP and Willow’s jointly presented case study, an example was shared of identifying and resolving a defect in an
individual switch asset. It demonstrated the core benefits of WillowTwin’s data centralisation, visualisation and validation, along with the ability to review condition monitoring and measurement data of critical assets in the field.
Having this kind of data centralised and available can transform the way organisations operate and can enable more people across a rail team to problem solve issues, rather than just relying on those with specialised software or experience.
“Live data brings digital twins to life. For example, if you are alerted to a defect or a speed restriction you can immediately drill into the spatial map to view the live track data to identify the problem,” Kalnins said.
“This information is available to both the reliability engineer at the office and the track inspector on site via their mobile device. Using intelligent analytics, it is possible to monitor for example switch performance over weeks or months to identify, predict and resolve faults
before they become a major disruptive issue to the network and a major cost.”
Kalnins is working closely with BHP to set the future roadmap to continuously enhance the digital twin as it evolves through further integrations to deliver real time KPIs, advanced analytics, scenario planning and the forecasting of asset health.
The aim is for the platform to enable a predictive approach to asset management, resulting in advanced modelling and scenariobased predictions across a network.
Daniel Kalins, Willow Head of Australia
WillowTwin for Rail centralises and structures data from rail systems, to create a digital twin.
