Railway infrastructure maintenance includes an exhaustive visual inspection of the catenary or overhead line equipment (OLE) by an operator. These visual inspections are very costly, relatively inaccurate and often block the lines undergoing inspection for considerable periods, thereby reducing the network’s productivity and competitiveness.
On average, the rail sector spends EUR 39600 per kilometre of track on rail infrastructure maintenance, which accounts for 38 % of total operating expenses. Since the EU has around 111000 kilometres of railway infrastructure, total annual maintenance costs are over EUR 4356 million. To become more competitive, Europe’s rail sector must find ways to reduce these costs.
The project tCat developed by TELICE addresses this challenge by developing an innovative system that dramatically reduces maintenance costs related to overhead line equipment at a 5:1 rate. It consists of a workstation, adapted to the most common rail gauges in the EU, with the following features:
(1) On-board automatic data acquisition and data processing: main sensor based in LIDAR technology enables faster processing speeds than other solutions in the market. Data is processed in real time, offering results during on-site inspection.
(2) Simple use: specific algorithms developed by TELICE under the project enable automatic detection of the main geometrical parameters of the overhead line equipment, avoiding on-field typical positioning mistakes and thus resulting in a better user experience.
(3) Analytics performed over generated data brings the rail sector the benefits for a more reliable identification and prediction of potential issues concerning the overhead line equipment. The historic logs of the main geometrical parameters will allow the railway operators to apply predictive maintenance techniques to their infrastructures. All this data can be easily on-line accessed by a remote user as the tCat implements the feature of connecting to a cloud platform.
(4) Light-weight (about 30 kg) and highly manageable device, based in the integration of all sensors in an all-weather and foldable measuring trolley, easy to transport in any vehicle and easy to assemble in the field.
The overall objectives of the project were:
O1: Upgrade and adapt TELICE’s former prototype. To develop a tCat product based on a tested baseline prototype to which several improvements were to be incorporated in order to upgrade the equipment and to respond to market requirements.
O2: Test and demonstrate the adapted models. To test the tCat device in a real railway environment by means of four pilots throughout the most representative market scenarios of importance to TELICE and major economic and strategic potential: UK, Germany, Spain and USA.
O3: Build a network of stakeholders. To build a network of stakeholders in the target markets for commercialisation (UK, Germany, Spain and USA) in order to support TELICE in the commercial and exploitation phase. Also, to update the country-specific go-to-market strategies considering peculiarities, market structure and concrete agreements reached with local stakeholders.
O4: Communication and promotion plan. To design and implement a market-oriented communication and promotion plan for the product to effectively reach the following four target audiences: infrastructure operators, large engineering firms, maintenance service providers and public bodies responsible for infrastructure security monitoring.
Regarding the objectives above, the conclusions of the action are the following:
O1: A valid industrial design, developed based on the former prototype, was satisfactorily tested on the field pilots and is ready for the industrialisation phase starting right after project completion.
O2: Four pilot tests were successfully performed with a promising feedback of the contacted companies for the four countries. Besides, 12 additional pre-commercial demos and tests were also performed in those markets for interested companies.
O3: A total of 31 pre-commercial agreements/MoUs have been obtained with local stakeholders in the target markets for commercialisation. The project has enabled TELICE to build a strong network with an active database of 250+ contacts. The go-to-market strategies were updated by country, founding a slower growth potential in Spain and Germany and a very promising future in UK and USA.
O4: A marketing plan was devised to reach the four target audiences, reaching up to 160 bilateral meetings in the whole project. To ensure a better dissemination of the results, a strategy based in both social media and the presence in sectorial events (up to 7 in the four considered countries) was followed.
