PRODUCTS & TECHNOLOGY
Smarter all the time: Local firm enhancing remote condition monitoring technologies As the rail industry trends towards more efficient operating practices, MRD Rail Technologies managing director, Rob Gersbach, sees no limit to the application of predictive asset maintenance technology throughout the rail corridor.
“I
N THE FUTURE, WE BELIEVE ALL major rail assets will be remotely monitored by condition monitoring systems,” MRD managing director Rob Gersbach tells Rail Express. “These will be either built in by the manufacturers (smart) or implemented by third party integrations such as TrackSense. MRD are also working with points machine manufacturers to include TrackSense in their products.” TrackSense is MRD’s predictive asset condition monitoring system. Relying on Australian-manufactured plug and play loggers designed to be robust, compact and affordable, TrackSense’s primary goal is to give meaning to data to allow the customer to make data driven maintenance decisions. MRD has 30 years’ experience designing and manufacturing electronic equipment for the rail industry. Three years ago, it launched TrackSense to capitalise on this with a push into the growing space of predictive maintenance and condition monitoring. Now, Gersbach explains, MRD is moving to ensure it can help customers apply predictive
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asset condition monitoring to improve each of its core maintenance tasks. “We see all trackside location cabinets (LOCs) being transformed into ‘Smart LOCs’ containing remote condition monitoring systems capable of monitoring all assets within the LOC using one Remote Condition Monitoring (RCM) Logger,” he said. “Price has been a major barrier to achieving this in the past but this has rapidly changed due to competition and technology such as cloud hosting. MRD has adopted this technology and is at the forefront of the movement towards affordable open platform RCM solutions.” Gersbach says one of the key benefits of TrackSense for his customers is that it is open protocol. “Open protocol solutions will become the standard in RCM solutions as this gives the customer security, independence and the flexibility to shop around for the most competitive hosting solution and analytics package of their choice,” he said. “It also allows for easy integration with the customer’s Asset Maintenance System.” This preference towards open protocol is also being driven by specialisation of analytics platforms from major computing vendors. “We are also seeing the emergence of
Through the TrackSense system all assets within the LOC can be monitored remotely using one Remote Condition Monitoring Logger. TrackSense loggers are manufactured in Australia.
RAIL EXPRESS | ISSUE 9 2019
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