As the focus on innovation within the rail industry increases, many rail operators are looking towards digitisation to optimise their performance, improve safe operation, reduce costs, and streamline their business processes.
Every railway has specific fault modes, safety, mechanical and operational challenges, and opportunities. Many of these can be positively impacted through the digitisation of rolling stock condition information.
Condition Data Digitisation
Trimble® Beena Vision® vision-based technology provides condition data digitisation via a comprehensive suite of wayside systems and software. Trimble condition monitoring software, uses condition data, together with sophisticated rules engines, analysis and processing tools to generate the information and business insights that drive real and sustainable change in railways’ operational and asset performance.
Trimble software has been designed in partnership with key rail operators and is built to integrate with real world rail businesses. Trimble Beena Vision wayside inspection systems are supported by sophisticated analysis tools and software that turn the raw data and images Trimble systems collect into information and insights that define and provide a complete overview of train fleets and rolling stock condition.
Integration to Rail Ecosystem
Importantly, Trimble recognises that condition monitoring software must operate within a wider railway “ecosystem” of applications and business processes and Trimble software is designed to be integrated with these types of applications and services. Data from this “ecosystem” can also be imported into Trimble software to enrich insights provided. This complete overview delivers timely information to the right people to inform proactive operational and engineering decisions.
Deriving actionable insight from data is the key to improving efficiency and reliability across a rail operator’s organisation. Via faster enhanced data preparation and contextualisation, and the application of intelligent analytics, data can be modelled to show trends and patterns that would otherwise remain hidden.
Complete Rolling Stock Awareness
Rolling stock awareness across multiple platforms facilitates condition based maintenance. The ability to inspect trains and vehicles using Trimble vision-based systems significantly improves the overall safety performance of fleets by inspecting them more efficiently and effectively, at a much higher frequency. For one Australian customer train partings were almost eliminated through the ability to detect a leading indicator of the causal factor up to seven days before the failure would have occurred.
Real World Rail Solutions
Trimble Beena Vision solutions are relied upon to improve safety, reduce costs, improve asset utilisation and optimise reliability for some of the longest, heaviest and fastest trains in the world. Trimble has a significant number of systems installed at most major North American Class 1 railroads, including BNSF, Norfolk Southern, CSX, Canadian National, Union Pacific, and Canadian Pacific. Over 200 Trimble Beena Vision wayside monitoring systems are in operation globally with multiple major operators, including over 50 systems in Australia with Aurizon, BHP, Rio Tinto and FMG, in Europe with SNCF in France and VR in Finland, in South America with Vale, VLI, and MRS in Brazil, and in the Middle East with Etihad in the United Arab Emirates.
Trimble is working within the rail industry to create meaningful predictive analytics solutions that reduce risk and boost efficiency. By using its expertise in optimising the data value chain, Trimble is focused on building tools that enable predictive operational awareness across an entire networks’ operation.