Reduce costs and optimize maintenance work, be able to anticipate new projects; have accurate and objective information, have a perfect knowledge of the appearance of railway installations (number of defects, types of defects, environment etc.)
These are some of the benefits of digital twins for the rail industry.
While it was first developed in the field of construction, the digital twin — or virtual replica of a physical infrastructure that allows to reproduce the conditions and behaviors of its physical counterpart — is increasingly becoming a necessity in the rail sector.
This is not surprising since, according to one recent trade media report, networks using predictive maintenance solutions such as digital twins reported a reduction in maintenance costs of up to 30% and a 40% decrease in unplanned downtime.
This is a boon, especially as global demand for passenger rail transport is expected to grow at a rate of 3.6% by 2031.
You want to benefit from these advantages? Do you want to deploy the digital twin but don’t know how to do it or where to start?
Altametris, the French subsidiary of the rail infrastructure manager SNCF Réseau, specialising in agile processing of railway data, puts its skills at the service of all European infrastructure managers to increase their performance.
It offers solutions that allow you to exploit the potential of the digital twin regardless of the level of maturity of digital adoption in your company:
- Being supported in adopting digital: the company offers consulting services. Business experts audit your company; offer you a data acquisition trajectory and accompany you to start your first digital projects.
- Being accompanied to capture the data: collecting digital data without impacting the operation of railway installations, this is one of Altametris’ great strengths. Drone, helicopter, IoT sensors, measurement trains, the company knows how to mobilize all non-capacitive vectors to collect data in quality.
- Be accompanied to process the data: turnkey services are offered to automate the processing of large volumes of data to detect and classify defects.
- View, share, store data: the company has developed a powerful software accessible to all via a simple web browser.
Thanks to this SaaS software, Altametris is positioned as a major player in digital asset management in France.
Since the Altametris Suite software allows infrastructure managers to perform efficient diagnosis of the state of infrastructures.
Maintenance managers benefit from a centralized, actionable and enriched data, they can focus on their expertise instead of collecting and structuring data. They have a simple and intuitive tool with ergonomic data exploitation functions such as:
- The visualization and annotation of 3D infrastructures on colored point clouds
- The precise and detailed visualization of infrastructures in high quality 2D
- Navigation in panorama mode
- The comparison of different types of data in layers
The optimization of maintenance work thanks to the digital twin allows a gradual switch from curative or systematic modes to a more conditional mode, preventive or predictive for uses such as:
- Characterization of hazardous vegetation
- Conformity check of ballast profiles
- The measurement of catenary geometry
- Obstacle detection and Clearance analysis
- Rock wall diagnosis
For example, by analysing the compliance of ballast, gains of the order of 30% can be envisaged, through better use of human resources, materials (targeted ballasting reducing raw material consumption and limiting the mobilization of heavy equipment).
Regarding the ways of optimizing rail maintenance through the digital twin, the company developed a white paper detailing practical advice for infrastructure managers. It also details the successful application cases of the digital railway twin at SNCF Réseau.
It is available for free download here: https://hubs.ly/Q02LQl0K0
