CONDITION MONITORING
Siemens striving for 100 per cent availability Siemens Mobility Head of Data Services, Gerhard Kress, tells Rail Express about the transport technology firm’s push for a world with zero unscheduled railway outages.
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F YOU’VE REGULARLY CAUGHT THE train in a major Australian city, the prospect of a passenger rail service with zero unscheduled downtime seems too good to be true. Fortunately for Gerhard Kress, Siemens Mobility’s Head of Data Services, the idea is not so difficult to comprehend. “If you combine very good maintenance processes with a proper use of data, you can actually get to very high availabilities,” Kress tells Rail Express on the sidelines of Digitalize 2019 in Brisbane. “Across the globe at the moment we have 17 or 18 projects where we achieve from 99.92 to 99.98 per cent availability. “One flagship is the high-speed connection in Russia, from Moscow to St Petersburg, where the last technically-induced delay was in February 2018; 10 million kilometres without an unscheduled outage. “To achieve this, you need to have some solid underlying processes.” Siemens Mobility’s solution to provide such “solid underlying processes” is Railigent. Siemens says Railigent is designed to make the best use of data to guide rail operators towards 100 per cent availability. Powered by the company’s open Internet of Things (IoT) operating system, MindSphere, Railigent applies artificial intelligence and sophisticated analytics to large volumes of rail data collected by IoT devices in the field. Kress calls it “predictive monitoring”, and it
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ISSUE 6 2019 | RAIL EXPRESS
has major maintenance applications across fixed infrastructure and rollingstock.
Turning maintenance depots into pit stops
ABOVE: Having near zero unscheduled downtime on train services is possible with Railigent.
Kress says the focus for Siemens in developing the Railigent solution has been to help operators achieve lean but robust maintenance processes, through the support of very efficient documentation. “You have to make sure that every time a train comes into the depot, you can continue right away with your maintenance program where you left off,” Kress says. Along with scheduled maintenance regime, the predictive monitoring technology allows for corrective maintenance to be scheduled on a train before something goes wrong. In the example of Siemens’ Thameslink operations in the United Kingdom, 40 per cent of all corrective maintenance tickets are created automatically by the Railigent system, while the other 60 per cent come from data fed from the system to the maintenance desk, where it is assessed so appropriate work orders can be created while the train is still on the tracks. All of this is compiled into instructions for maintenance teams well ahead of a train’s arrival at a depot. This way those teams can be ready with the right parts and tools in the right places, so when one of Thameslink’s 8- to 12-car trains come into the depot, work can begin on the right sections
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