Railways defined the first industrial revolution – now technology is at the heart of train networks’ modernisation in the 21st century.
Forrester principal analyst Dan Bieler wrote: “Businesses can obtain major benefits – including better customer experiences and operational excellence – from the Internet of Things (IoT) by extracting insights from connected objects and delivering feature-rich connected products.”
The transportation sector experiences challenges to manage safe, secure operations of trains vis-a-vis the commercial and passenger transportation. These systems are the backbone of global supply chain and logistics management for the distributions of manufactured products. Commercial vehicles require real-time information systems to transmit data to track consignments in the supply chain systems. The rapid increase in number of passenger and commercial vehicles worldwide has led to numerous transport challenges, such as traffic congestions, accidents.
Organizations widely adopt numerous modes of transportation, such as air, roads, railways, and marine transportation systems, for the movement of consignments from one place to another. A railway network comprises thousands, if not millions of components, from rolling stock to signals, rails, stations and the staff who run it all. All the constituent parts need to work cohesively to avoid delays and dissatisfaction among commuters. The industrial internet, where IoT devices are combined with analytics, is set to revolutionise train operations.
French national train operator SNCF is using the industrial internet powered by IBM Watson’s deep learning analytics platform and the SigFox IoT network to boost efficiency. The strategy is part of the company’s 2020 Vision, to become an industrial champion striving for operational excellence and optimum efficiency by using the IoT. Using the IoT to support the operations of a rail service is now possible thanks to advances in the underlying technology, according to Yves Tyrode, Digital Director at SNCF.
Telecommunications networks are becoming dedicated to industrial internet applications and broadband has already got cheaper. The train company runs fibre along its tracks (example: RailTel OFC Communication backbone and network on the Indian Railways) and has relationships with mobile operators to make use of this network to maintain continuous mobile broadband connectivity.
The mobile network supports both commuters and the SNCF’s remote data acquisition requirements. Sensors for data acquisition are getting smaller and now consume less energy. In some cases, battery life can extend up to five years. SNCF said this is important because it is not always possible to be close to an electrical supply. The third area is maturity of the cloud, which SNCF said would be used to store sensor data and provide the elastic computing required for big data analytics.
Working with Ericsson, IBM, SigFox and sensor specialist Intesens, the rail operator will deploy sensors on trains and tracks to reduce failures and improve the reliability of trains, signals and tracks. Making sense of sensor data collected remotely over the internet is computationally challenging.
President of IBM France Nicolas Sekkaki said: “We have entered an industrial era.” The company has established an IoT centre for its Watson deep learning technology centre in Munich. “We have developed an infrastructure to measure IoT data,” said Sekkaki.
According to SNCF, IoT will enable the company both to improve customer service and the competitiveness of its trains. SNCF estimated that the maintenance of tracks and trains could reduce costs by a factor of 10.
Engineers can connect to running trains in real time, enabling the company to figure out whether a component is likely to fail, which could lead to the train being taken out of service. The cloud enables SNCF to run distributed calculations, the results of which can be reinjected into its train and rail maintenance processes. For example, said Vincent Mazarguil, Director-Asset Management at SNCF, the company used big data systems to capture telematics data. “We can anticipate breakdown and model predictive maintenance,” he said. For instance, he said the train operator could identify a faulty signal component, which could be fixed before it failed.
Reduce maintenance
Remote monitoring is also helping the rail operator reduce the maintenance time in the train depot. Train windshield water tanks are being equipped with a level sensor, which uses Sigfox to communicate information back to SNCF. A technician is then able to access this information via a web application on a tablet to see whether the water needs topping up.
Other data acquisition devices are fitted to the transmission system on TGV trains run by SNCF. The company has developed a prototype where sensors take gearbox oil temperature and oil level measurements. The data is transmitted over GSM and can be accessed remotely at the train depot, enabling technicians to see how well the gearbox is performing.
There are also Sigfox communication devices to measure the water level tank in the TGV toilets. This is also used speed up the turnaround time when the train arrives at a depot.
Reliance Group launches a new IoT venture with Cisco Jasper
Anil Ambani-led Reliance Group has partnered with Cisco-owned Jasper to launch UNLIMIT, a dedicated business unit that will provide Internet of things (IoT) solutions to Indian and International enterprise customers.
As per UNLIMIT’s website, the venture will offer IoT solutions across four key verticals – Automobile (connected cars & fleet management), Manufacturing (asset & material tracking, industrial automation), finance (IoT payments, wireless PoS, and surveillance), health care (elder care and remote patient monitoring) and smart cities.
The venture is currently offering a three month trial of its IoT platform, that provides users full access to its platform along with three trial SIMs and upto 100 MB of data and 30 SMS messages per SIM at no extra charge to end user.
Reliance Group which signed an alliance with Jasper in August last year, had said in July that it plans to grow its IoT business by leveraging its customer base of over 250 million and domain expertise across existing business verticals in telecommunications, power and utilities, financial services, road and metro rail transportation, and healthcare.
To this end, the group had jointly piloted various IoT solutions early this year. Some of the pilots include – decreasing power transmission and distribution losses through smart grid management at Reliance Energy; to help consumers lower their energy bills through demand side management and Fleet Management of maintenance vehicles; assess the risk profile of vehicle insurance customers through vehicle telematics at Reliance General Insurance and remote healthcare and assisted living at Kokilaben Dhirubhai Ambani Hospital.
The group had said in July that it now plans to scale up these solutions and make it available for external customers under the leadership of Juergen Hase who was appointed as the group CEO of its IoT business.
Jasper, now part of Cisco, is an American corporation headquartered in Santa Clara, California that provides a cloud-based software platform for the Internet of Things (IoT) and, more specifically, to enable product businesses to become IoT service businesses. The platform is designed to help organizations launch, manage, and monetize the deployment of the Internet of Things worldwide.
Founded in 2004, Jasper partners with over 120 mobile operator networks to serve IoT and machine-to-machine(M2M) companies across a wide range industries including: automotive, home security and automation, agriculture, food/beverage, wearable technology, healthcare, advertising and industrial equipment. On May 2, 2014, the company formerly called Jasper Wireless, Inc., announced a new company name: Jasper Technologies, Inc. The company attributed the change to more accurately representing the company’s product offerings.
On February 3, 2016, Cisco Systems announced its plans to acquire Jasper for $1.4 billion, and on March 22, 2016, finalized the $1.4B acquisition.
With the acquisition, Jasper becomes the IoT Cloud business unit within Cisco. Jasper’s CEO, Jahangir Mohammed, is now the GM of the IoT Cloud business unit – reporting to Rowan Trollope, SVP of the IoT and Collaboration Technology Group at Cisco.
INFORMATION CENTER - www.informationcenter.co.in
