Bringing next-generation predictive maintenance, network usage and traffic monitoring and planning solutions for railway infrastructure management: KONUX

Some see data as “the new oil” – defined as a diminishing resource, valuable in its scarcity. A resource worth protecting and competing for. Not us. For us, data has an unlimited potential and is to be shared and grown. At KONUX’s core, the team is experts in realizing the exponential value of data, by applying state-of-the-art data science and machine learning. Only by exploring the interconnectedness between maintenance and operations on the asset, network and traffic level, can we unleash the true value of data. The same piece of data can produce insights for asset maintenance planning, for optimizing operations, or even to inform passengers about delays. Or it can be fused with other data to produce something entirely different.

This enables a much more efficient way of managing the entire system: from how and when maintenance is performed, where trains are run, and how budgets, resources, and capacity are ultimately optimized.

KONUX Switch is a predictive maintenance system which helps infrastructure managers improve network availability, prolong asset lifetime, and empower their employees to make maintenance more efficient. Railway networks have to cope with increasing load and aging infrastructure. As maintenance needs get more frequent, manual inspections don’t suffice to detect them in advance. Switches are the most critical part of the rail infrastructure, causing approximately 20-30% of infrastructure-related delay minutes and costing €12bn a year globally to maintain and replace.

KONUX Switch is an end-to-end predictive maintenance system for rail switches. It uses IIoT devices and artificial intelligence to improve network capacity, extend asset lifetime and reduce costs. It continuously monitors and analyzes the health of key switch components such as the trackbed, and frog, and point machine and provides actionable recommendations. It ultimately allows for better maintenance planning by helping infrastructure managers anticipate failures before they happen and know the optimal time and type of maintenance needed.

Rail switches and crossings globally account for 20% of delay minutes, 15% of rail operating expenditures and 10% of capital expenditures. To tackle these challenges with enhanced switch maintenance, KONUX has been continually innovating for continuous monitoring and forecasting of switch health. By complementing this capability with traffic usage insights, KONUX aims to push toward the vision of enabling holistic and delay-free switches at optimal costs.

Understanding the impact of load on switch degradation

Today, inspection and maintenance are planned based on projected load. In some cases, projected load deviates from actual load by as much as 40%. Increasing freight traffic and maintenance-related rerouting fuel this discrepancy and the situation is expected to worsen. Such a regime causes switches to be over- or under-maintained, resulting in budget, workforce, and machinery shortages where they are needed.

With switch load and traffic insights, KONUX aims to help infrastructure managers efficiently plan inspection and maintenance where and when necessary. The critical parameters extracted from continuous monitoring such as tonnage, speed, train type, and overall train count allow you to analyze the daily usage of individual switches and prioritise the ones under higher pressure than others. This approach can complement the current inspection regime by enabling granular assessment within the existing categories.

By better understanding the link between switch load and degradation, the railway can move away from the fixed interval-based regime and manage the assets dynamically according to their actual needs. This approach can help optimize regional budgets by reducing over-/under-inspected switches and areas and, in the long run, transform today’s rule books toward the usage-based inspection regime.

Load and traffic insights to enable optimization beyond maintenance

KONUX’s mission is to make railway the mobility choice of tomorrow by increasing capacity, reliability and cost-efficiency. Understanding the impact of load on switch degradation can enable optimization not only at a switch level but also at a network level, allowing for network-wide usage monitoring and better traffic scheduling. Freeing up valuable track time for more traffic and allocating budgets optimally where needed will empower infrastructure managers to achieve ‘expanded capacity’ against the imminent challenges.

Understanding network traffic and usage

Inspection cycles, resource allocation and many other network-wide decisions are informed by how much traffic is running over the infrastructure. However, today’s information about tonnage, speed and traffic is unreliable and outdated. Planned and actual traffic differ by as much as 40%. This leads to over- and under-inspection, loss of operational capacity and a blind spot for infrastructure degradation. KONUX Network leverages AI and large scale data fusion from KONUX’s deployed S&C IIoT devices, customer and 3rd party data. It presents a model of actual daily traffic and its impact throughout the network. This helps regional managers, route directors, and planners to optimize inspection planning, allocate resources where they are needed and tackle capacity bottlenecks.

KONUX Traffic leverages AI and large scale data fusion to provide insights that help build more robust timetables, find more capacity in the existing ones, and support recovering capacity when delays occur.

Q. What is KONUX Labs?

A cross-functional team, working through KONUX’s notions and assumptions, market analyses, and technical feasibility studies with full steam.

Getting to the next big thing – faster

Which are the best ideas for the next new products on the horizon that help improve railway infrastructure? And what does it take to get them market-ready? KONUX looks into new technologies and solutions and identify the products it wants to bring to the market within the next couple of years.

Developing new ideas, reviewing external input, conducting market analysis, business planning, competition analysis, feasibility studies, and prototypes, KONUX Labs team is constantly evaluating new opportunities. Successful proof of concept jointly with a pilot customer should result in a new compelling product, which eventually goes live and will be a new addition to future railway infrastructure’s portfolio.

Popular use case

Infrabel, the Belgian public rail infrastructure service provider, embarked on a pilot with KONUX in 2019. The main goal of the pilot was to demonstrate the capability of KONUX Switch in trackbed health monitoring, trackbed health prediction, and maintenance validation.

The Challenge

Optimization of trackbed maintenance has been an old challenge for Infrabel. While not having the transparency of the problem due to a lack of insights, Infrabel was aware they could greatly improve their tamping practices and suboptimal maintenance planning.

One of the main problems was repetitive tamping. As the quality of the tamping operations could not be timely and adequately evaluated, the switches were tamped repetitively without a clear picture of their actual conditions, the root causes of the degradation, and the right methodology.

Another major challenge was that, in some regions, tamping operation planning was largely inefficient as the decisions were not based on actual switch conditions. The problematic assets were tamped on a fixed time-based approach and partly based on the convenience of simply being in the area. Occasionally, these ‘just-in-case’ tamping practices heightened the vertical displacement and worsened the stability of the trackbed

The Solution

The pilot began by equipping ten switches with 20 IIoT devices (two devices per switch). At the pilot’s later stage, two additional switches (one device per switch) were added. The devices were installed in the frog and point machine areas and both on wood and concrete sleepers. The installation was easy, safe, and speedy (performed within 10 minutes per device), and during the entire pilot, no device presented any potential safety hazard.

The Results

The pilot successfully proved KONUX Switch to be an optimal tool for Infrabel to support its decision making process for scheduling tamping operations and evaluating the effectiveness of such interventions. It was concluded that the costs currently associated with such interventions would be substantially reduced with the help of KONUX Switch. The pilot revealed a potential 66% savings in tamping operations.

Adam Bonnifield, Board Member, CEO

“Make railway the mobility choice of tomorrow by increasing capacity, reliability, and cost-efficiency.”