At European level, railway infrastructure and vehicle maintenance costs are estimated at above 20,000M€ per year. Distribution of maintenance expenses varies among countries and organizations, but according to several references, from the part of the infrastructure, track expenses represent between 40%-70% and electrification between 8-20% of the overall costs, where rail defects account for 30% and catenary system for 50% of the previous values respectively. From the vehicle point of view, major maintenance costs are wheelsets (typically 30%-50% of the total vehicle) and pantograph (typically between 5 and 10% of the vehicle maintenance cost). The previous figures are similar for all the infrastructure managers (IMs) and train operating companies (TOCs), which amount to over 330 in EU and 1500 organizations worldwide, and supposes over 8,000M€ of recurrent expenses in the EU.
In this context, SIA (System for vehicle-infrastructure Interaction Assets health status monitoring) has the objective of developing four ready-to-use new services (i.e. iCatMon, iPantMon, iWheelMon, iRailMon) to provide prognostic information about the health status of the railway’s most demanding assets in terms of maintenance costs, at the points of the interaction between the vehicle and the infrastructure (catenary, pantograph, wheelset and rail respectively).
In order to cope with the main objective of the project and to leverage these four new services, the following technical objectives are foreseen for the project:
Development of low-cost sensor nodes for wheel to rail and pantograph to catenary interaction characterization.
Development of a data hub that collects on-board information, provides accurate position and time stamping with high availability, and transmits the information to a trackside visualization platform.
Development of predictive component degradation models that will enable anticipating to future eventual failures by means of the analysis of future scenarios.
Development of a visualization platform with two plug-in software modules specific for the railway infrastructure (catenary and rail, i.e. iCatMon and iRailMon respectivelly) and vehicle maintenance (pantograph and wheelset, i.e. iPantMon and iWheelMon respectivelly).
