How can you identify different failures of rail infrastructure?

By collecting data with sensors, manual inspections of railway infrastructure on a regular basis are no longer needed. At RailTech Europe, RailMonitor gives a free workshop about identifying failures with monitoring data from Luxembourg.

“30 percent of failures of rail infrastructure can be found with manual inspections, as a rule of thumb”, says Niels Juul CTO and co-founder of RailMonitor. “You can compare it to the tip of an iceberg, only with monitoring you have a broader view of the failures and what causes them.”

RailMonitor has installations in seven countries in Europe, and deployed more than 1000 sensors. Starting off in their home country Denmark, they co-created their first and second product with the Danish infrastructure manager and construction companies. The company provides an entire system; the IoT (Internet of Things) sensors that collect data and the processing software to identify failures.

Quality of the infrastructure

Based on the data, the software platform can help identify different failures, and see trends over time so that future degradation of track can be predicted with Artificial Intelligence. Rail infrastructure managers often have different departments that have their own information, says Juul. “ With a digital solution, we make the same information available for everyone instead of a patchwork, and the maintenance planning can be automated. It gives knowledge of how assets are performing and how maintenance activities that are commissioned by the infrastructure owner perform.”

The system is largely the same for each deployment, but with slight differences. “90 percent of what we developed covers all countries, the rest can be tailored to the different infrastructure managers and their own ways to collect data”, says Juul.

Rail monitoring workshop

At RailTech Europe in Utrecht, the Netherlands, Niels Juul will give a workshop on 22 June. “We will look at some data from Luxembourg of switches, and will dive into how we link the data to different failure modes, both mechanical and electrical”, says Juul. Luxembourg’s infrastructure manager CFL will call in and share how they use RailMonitor’s system.

“We hope to bring to the table what the exact benefits of digitising are”, says Juul. “A lot of people ask about the business case of digitising, and will clarify any questions people have about monitoring in rail.”

Registration for the exhibition and workshops of RailTech Europe is free, so get your ticket below. Reserving a spot at the workshop can be done here.