Abstract: Maintenance activities represent a vital activity required to ensure service delivery but also an activity that is often overlooked. Maintenance practices have traditionally been driven by two philosophies: Regular Inspection and Run to Fail. These approaches provide have drawbacks in terms of cost and impact to the rail operations. Condition Based Maintenance provides an alternative philosophy that focuses the maintenance effort to only where and when it is required. Intelligent Asset Management is a system designed to implement Condition Based Maintenance. This system operates by gathering data from the actual equipment in the field and undertaking analysis of that data in real time to predict the performance of the equipment in the future. This capability allows the railways to optimise the maintenance practices around the needs of individual items of equipment. The Intelligent Asset Management system has been deployed for a Major European Infrastructure Provider. Initially a pilot deployment in Mid-2008, focusing on point monitoring, the benefits achieved has led to a gradual increase in assets being monitored. Condition Based Maintenance has proved so successful for the Infrastructure Provider that a network wide deployment has begun, with the published number of monitored assets exceeded 30,000 and includes not only points but is extended to monitor track circuits, points heaters, rail temperature monitoring and cable insulation monitoring. Intelligent Asset Management provides the tools and capability to implement a Condition Based Maintenance approach and achieve a reduction in service affecting faults whilst also optimising the maintenance effort and costs.
Publication Year: 2013
Publication Date: 2013-01-01
Language: en
Type: article
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