Integrated Railway Condition Monitoring System
Railway condition monitoring systems has rapidly developed in the past few years and evolved from alarm systems such as hot bearing detectors through to sophisticated in-motion measurement systems measuring wheel profiles to a very high accuracy. These systems are developed by specialist measurement companies and installed as individual systems . Although these standalone systems provide a healthy return on investment their use from a rolling stock maintenance point of view is very cumbersome and requires a lot of data post processing. Integration of all these monitoring and measurement systems not only allowed the automation of post processing, but presents the opportunity to combine different measurement system results through algorithms which transforms data into very useful operational and maintenance information. In addition it allowed the development of a system with a rolling stock centred view rather than the traditional measurement system centric view. Interfacing the integrated system with other maintenance support systems such as SAP, enabled a change from scheduled to condition based maintenance process.