Smart Maintenance and the Rail Traveller Experience

Project: Research

Project Details

Description

Most maintenance activities in the current railway system are carried out on a scheduled basis. This potentially means that components and sub systems are not replaced at the optimum time and that components fail between interventions. SMaRTE will provide the methodology for implementation of a Condition Based Maintenance system appropriate for the railway. This will allow maintenance to be tailored around the actual remaining life of key components and will reduce costs and improve reliability and availability. Knowledge and experience from other sectors will be extracted and new scientific methods for handling data and setting up architectures and intelligence systems to process data will be developed; appropriate to the railway system. Case studies will be designed and carried out for two different but typical passenger railways and lessons learned will be used to improve the system definitions. The final result of the SMaRTE project will be a CBM system which works for passenger railways and will result in reduced system costs and improved system reliability. The premise of SMaRTE (Human Factors) is that reducing customer cognitive effort is key to rail usability. Achieving a more streamlined process of accessing rail should increase its attractiveness. Whilst there is substantial evidence on the impact of factors such as fares / journey time on rail usage, the impact of more subtle factors deterring passengers from using rail are less understood. SMaRTE places the focus on the customer, utilising an innovative multi-disciplinary approach to understand the primary factors impacting on user decisions to choose rail (or an alternative) - and producing new quantitative evidence on the relative importance of those factors. The final result of SMaRTE will be a set of quantified factors influencing rail usability, and recommendations on how to decrease the cognitive effort and onward mobility for rail journeys through a "Smart Journey Vision" and rail map of measures.
Short titleSMaRTE
StatusFinished
Effective start/end date1/09/1731/08/19

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