Let Your Data Ride Safely
Insight
Network Rail is the English company that rules over one of the oldest railway networks in the world. It has 20,000 track miles, 40,000 among bridges, tunnels, stations, telephone and electrical systems and land, making it Britain’s largest landowner.
Over the years, the effective management of asset information had proved to be quite problematic: analysts had the data but had no means to correlate track statuses with their geographical location. A gap that did not allow Network Rail to manage planning and maintenance processes of the railway network in the best way.
This was the need beyond its request to draft and act on a strategic plan to ameliorate maintenance and asset renewal operations while maintaining the life cycle cost of the system at its lowest possible. For this reason, Network Rail needed to be able to monitor and track conditions across the rail network.
Solution
Iconsulting has developed a Location Intelligence solution that outlines a precise and consolidated picture of each rail route allowing companies to plan and monitor maintenance activities. This solution allows greater attention to the data coming from the sensors, to the costs and their correlations with the territory. A Geo-Data Warehouse has been created to allow direct access to all relevant data, in the optimal format. All spatial information concerning rail conditions (defects, failures and breakages) are collected using a linear reference system. This means that for each segment of the 20,000-mile rail network, the Location Intelligence solution calculates a set of indicators by integrating, cleaning and validating data of different formats such as lines, images and tables.
Impact
The project links the geographic and analytical data collected by the sensors and offers a new and powerful analysis perspective, supporting the integration of decision-making processes throughout the organization, which is one of the fundamental principles for the good management of the business assets.