Thales Pit Stop: Predict and Prevent in the Digital Railway

The Thales Pit Stop will identify opportunities and challenges in infrastructure maintenance and allow participants to collaborate on developing best in class ‘predict and prevent’ infrastructure and maintenance capabilities.

Background

Rail network operators are looking to shift from observing their infrastructure assets to monitoring, diagnosing and acting on the health status of their infrastructure in real time. Thales technology assists in monitoring over 42,000 assets on the UK rail network. It provides alerts and alarms to inform maintenance and operations personnel where interventions may be needed. Other infrastructure assets that require monitoring include: 20,000 miles of tracks; 32,000 bridges and tunnels; track beds and ballasts; track circuits and railway boundaries.

Thales has created a proof of concept for remote condition monitoring of its rail infrastructure (signalling and points systems) that moves toward a ‘predict and prevent’ approach to infrastructure asset maintenance. This initial proof of concept was presented and generated significant interest at InnoTrans this September.

Following this initial success, Thales is now looking to further develop this initial ‘predict and prevent’ proof of concept by connecting with potential collaborators in the areas of real time monitoring, predictive analytics and other areas that could generate actionable information for rail operators.

What to expect

During the Pit Stop, participants will collaborate with Thales, experts and innovators to:

• Develop a shared understanding of the end user/customer problem space
• Learn about the current scope of the Thales proof of concept (including a demonstration)
• Highlight opportunities for addressing the main goals of generating more efficiencies in maintenance regimes
• Meeting the customer needs for real time monitoring, predicting and acting on infrastructure asset maintenance
• Explore how digital capabilities or applications could be integrated as part of the proof of concept or utilised as stand-alone value propositions to address these goals

Who should attend?

We are looking for innovators with transport domain knowledge and solutions in:

• Real time (and remote) infrastructure/asset monitoring
• Modelling and simulation of asset behaviour and characteristics
• Data analytics
• Data capture
• Workflow management systems
• Related relevant solutions.

We are particularly interested in more mature solutions that do not require significant infrastructure investment on behalf of network operators in the short term.

This Pit Stop is application only – please apply below before Wednesday 9 November 2016 and we will email to confirm your place.

Why should innovators and experts attend?

Thales is interested in identifying collaboration partners for developing a version 2.0 of the ‘predict and prevent’ proof of concept, as well as learning about standalone solutions that can assist rail operators in more intelligent monitoring and infrastructure maintenance.

Innovators selected to partner with Thales may benefit from joint development funding and a route to market by initial deployment through the existing Thales UK’s Transport business’ customer base. Thereafter, Thales may be able to provide an international route to market for worldwide exploitation of the innovation through their global Intelligent Infrastructure Maintenance product line.

Innovators could also benefit from involvement in upcoming collaborations between Thales and rail operators.

We are expecting attendance from rail operators in their role as potential customers for ‘predict and prevent’ infrastructure/asset management capabilities, e.g. Network Rail, Transport for London and Transport for Greater Manchester (TBC).

Pit Stop Dates

1 December 2016 (6pm-9pm)

2 December 2016 (9am-6:30pm)

About Thales

Thales is a global technology leader for the aerospace, transport, defence and security markets. With 62,000 employees in 56 countries, Thales reported sales of €14bn in 2015. With over 22,000 engineers and researchers, Thales has a unique capability to design and deploy equipment, systems and services to meet the most complex customer requirements. Its exceptional international footprint allows it to work closely with its customers all over the world.