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GREAT DEAL: VR FleetCare collaborates with EKE-Electronics. What solutions are they providing for rolling stock and track infrastructure?

GREAT DEAL: VR FleetCare collaborates with EKE-Electronics. What solutions are they providing for rolling stock and track infrastructure?
photo: VR FleetCare/GREAT DEAL: VR FleetCare collaborates with EKE-Electronics. What solutions are they providing for rolling stock and track infrastructure?
28 / 09 / 2022

Digitalization is a major trend in rail transport and offers a lot of opportunities to improve maintenance operations. To enable customers to take advantage of this, VR FleetCare and EKE-Electronics recently announced a collaboration of their sales and project implementation that will give customers access to a wider range of technical and support services for advanced condition-based maintenance solutions of trains and track infrastructure.

Specifically, the subject of the co-operation is a system for measuring the condition and operation of the bogie system of rolling stock and its subsystems, as well as the condition of the track from standard in-service trains.

“With our SmartCare solutions, we help our customers to transition from time-based maintenance to condition-based rolling stock and track maintenance. The objective of the collaboration agreement with EKE-Electronics is to offer our customers digital solutions that can improve operational reliability, optimize track and rolling stock maintenance and reduce life cycle costs”, says Sami Kalevirta, Head of Digital Services at VR FleetCare.

Jointly developed system for remote condition monitoring

These solutions and their sophisticated analytics functionalities have been jointly developed and verified on commercial trains of VR Group running on the track of the Finnish Traffic Infrastructure Agency (FTIA) since 2019. They form a complete end-to-end condition monitoring solution enabling the implementation of condition-based maintenance for rolling stock and track infrastructure.

The system has already been able to detect several rail surface defects at their early stage when they are still easy to repair. Typically, this type of defect is observed by measurement trains only when the defect has spread to the supporting structures and requires a larger maintenance operation.

The services now offered by the VR FleetCare and EKE-Electronics collaboration provide end-to-end support for the lifetime of the project. This includes VR FleetCare’s experience in installation planning and supervision, regulatory permissions, maintenance process optimization, and monitoring services. EKE-Electronics’ scope includes the SmartVision™ remote condition monitoring system including measurement equipment with edge processing software, secure communications between train and wayside as well as cloud-based software for analytics and visualization including ongoing support services.

Karl Lönngren, Director of Digital Services at EKE-Electronics said “EKE-Electronics, and its British subsidiary Humaware has benefited significantly from the development and field verification cooperation with VR FleetCare. With this new contract, we can now address the market with the developed solutions together with a full range of services offered from VR FleetCare, one of the front runners of deploying digitalization in railway maintenance operations.”

InnoTrans 2022 Speaker’s Corner

VR FleetCare and EKE-Electronics organized a seminar in cooperation at InnoTrans’ Speaker’s Corner in Hall 27. The seminar took place on Thursday, September 22, from 11.30-12.30 and the subject of the seminar was How to Digitalise Track and Train Maintenance Through the Power of Sisu.

The seminar covered the benefits of machine learning in train operations and maintenance, finding a path from time-consuming routines to productive work, and the results that the implementation of condition monitoring on railway infrastructure has had in Finland. The topics dealt with questions such as how to obtain real-life information on the condition of the assets and what kind of value can be expected from condition monitoring of switches and track circuits.

 

Source: VR FleetCare Press Releases

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