Monitoring and identification of faults in the infrastructure at LVB
Public transport contributes to reducing emissions, but still offers potential for optimising resources and avoiding waste. An EU-funded project called CE4CE* aims to reduce the environmental footprint of public transport through greater circularity. The project promotes circular economy systems thinking among public transport stakeholders to reduce waste and create value along new life cycles of infrastructure and rolling stock. To achieve this, CE4CE jointly develops solutions that increase the knowledge and capacity of the sector, reduce barriers and costs, and initiate the development of new services and skilled jobs, as well as strategies and action plans that improve policy development, learning and exchange at regional and transnational levels.
Our customer, Leipziger Verkehrsbetriebe (LVB), THE leading partner in the CE4CE project, is leading in a project whose main objective is to monitor infrastructure (track, track bed and catenary) and identify faults as well as enable future predictions of maintenance activities for infrastructure components. In this way, solutions are presented in a short time that serve the above-mentioned project goal. As an additional goal, the energy consumption of the vehicles will be monitored in order to identify methods to reduce overall energy consumption.
As part of this project, Ci4Rail was commissioned by LVB to collect condition data, identify faults and carry out analyses within the next two years, especially with regard to catenary, pantograph, rail and track systems, in order to optimise maintenance activities. Since measuring equipment is integrated into the vehicles for these purposes, it is possible to address other use cases. In the first step, additional energy consumption data will be collected in order to identify the energy cost drivers in relation to the vehicle, circulation, climate, time of day, position, etc. and thus reduce the daily operating costs through suitable measures.
Under the leadership of Ci4Rail, the project is being carried out with domain experts from catenary monitoring (Pantohealth GmbH) and track and track bed analysis (Cemit) in order to generate the optimal added value for LVB. For this purpose, measuring equipment will be installed in 3 tram vehicles, consisting of
- Accelerometers
- Laser Scanner
- Camera pointed at the catenary / pantograph contact
- Camera directed at the track bed
- High-precision positioning solution
- Edge computers for the acquisition of energy data, for the pre-processing of acceleration, camera and laser data and for transmission to the backend.
On the landside, the system is supplemented by a backend system from CE4CE project partner Kruch Railway Innovations, which implements not only data storage but also cloud-side processing, analysis and visualization of the results. As the recipient of the data from this back-end platform, our customer LVB is then able to evaluate identified faults in the infrastructure live, make deductions for maintenance and implement measures to increase energy efficiency.
Ci4Rail is convinced that the approach of permanent data collection and evaluation in the shortest possible time shows great potential for optimizing maintenance processes, reducing waste, exploiting the optimal component service life and saving energy.
We would like to thank our customer LVB for the trust they have placed in us and look forward to making the project a success together with our partners.
* More information about the CE4CE https://www.interreg-central.eu/projects/ce4ce/
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