Whitepaper: The Road to Railway Digitalization
Hop on the Digital Train
Like most industries, the rail infrastructure is also experiencing a digital transformation whose impact is hard to grasp. Technologies like Internet-of-Things, Artificial Intelligence and Predictive Maintenance are revolutionising the rail industry and are forcing rail operators to become more agile and flexible.
Grab your whitepaper copy today and discover the opportunities of the railway digitalization to get your rail operations of track with predictive maintenance.
All sectors of industry and society are affected by advancing digitalization, which offers new opportunities to expand services and make operations more efficient. This includes the capital-intensive railway market, with its extensive asset base comprising rolling stock and critical infrastructure.
On the one hand, we are witnessing a digital evolution in infrastructure. More and more classic, robust hardware facilities that provide limited, fixed functionality are being replaced by “lean & mean” digital solutions that offer more options and more flexibility. On the other hand, there are the revolutionary digital vistas included in such exciting terms as Internet of Trains and Train- as-a-Service.
Internet of Things impacting Railways
Yes, the concept of the Internet of Things (IoT) has entered the railway market, at a time when it is looking for new business models in the wake of the servitization trend. This means that the focus of rolling stock and railway infrastructure OEMs is shifting from product sales to service provision. Their goal is to generate more recurring revenue, for example in the rolling stock market segment, in response to declining income due to stagnating investments in new fleets. This is in line with a core-competence strategy of asset operators dedicated to running train services, while outsourcing non- core activities such as maintenance.
These developments are highly relevant for the railway transportation market, because – irrespective of the exact organizational structure of the various players – it has the character of a public service. Thus, availability is crucial for the continuity of that service, while cost control is necessary to keep the service affordable and therefore accessible to the general public. Maintenance plays a crucial role here.
Enabling digital railways for better mobility through predictive maintenance
Thanks to advancing digitalization, maintenance is increasingly able to fulfill its role, because the nature of maintenance is shifting from corrective and preventive toward predictive. By predicting the need for maintenance in good time, inconvenient breakdowns, costly repairs, and unplanned downtime are prevented. In this way, digitalized, predictive maintenance can guarantee maximum availability at minimum costs.
At Sensorfy, we have accrued a lot of experience with the implementation of various IoT applications. Many of our use cases revolve around predictive maintenance, a number of which we have already implemented in the railway market. We appreciate the possibilities and the challenges of digitalizing infrastructure and making maintenance predictive, while having both in-house knowledge of the various technologies and the expertise to assess individual business cases.
In this whitepaper, we want to demonstrate the opportunities digitalization has for the railway market in general and for predictive maintenance of railway infrastructure in particular. Let us help you in getting your railway operations on track.
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