Smarter, Safer Trains
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At the beginning of October Siemens introduced RailFusion – a software designed to make our trains infrastructures safer and more efficient.
This new software, already at its pilot stages in North America, monitors and analyzes data points across an entire railroad’s infrastructure, including onboard and wayside assets, such as road crossings and end-of-train devices. All the data is transferred into the company’s database in real-time and analyzed in order to identify trends so as to better plan their operations and fix issues before they become a problem, without having to leave the office.
By inserting intelligence behind the captured data, the software can evolve to include predictive capabilities that will help railroads identify trends to better plan their operations and fix issues before they become a problem, resulting in greater time and cost savings. Ways the cloud-based system helps with smarter decision-making for railroads include enabling devices located on rail infrastructure to communicate with one another to remotely determine the status and effectiveness of maintenance activities, road crossings and locomotive operation; accessing live crossing occupation information in order to direct first responders to the quickest and most available route to save time in an emergency; identifying incorrect device behavior, such as false crossing activation and offering remote control to authorized operators, allowing them to address the traffic situation; analyzing patterns along the railroads based on historical data so railroads can more accurately plan their operations to become more reliable and efficient and offering operators of all skill levels a platform to manage complex rail infrastructure.
Once again the Big Data age shows how it can make our lives more efficient by analyzing countless pieces of information in real-time. But like any technological innovation that offers efficiency and comfort – it is important to make sure that it is protected against cyber attacks and terrorists, it being connected to the internet.
