Episode 08 - Digital Railway zentrak: Part I

As mentioned in the introduction, so we are starting with the big picture.

When we now look at the railway infrastructure today, why is a holistic approach becoming so critical? We've talked about this holistic approach also within the last few episodes.

But why are we bringing that up now again?

Yeah, I think the railway infrastructure is becoming so critical because it's a very complex and fast-changing world and the modern rail systems are highly complex and interconnected.

Then it's so important that increasing capacity demand and also the increasing demand for keeping the availability of our tracks as maximum as possible is always the goal we want to reach.

And therefore also maintenance becomes a critical factor and must be optimized over the whole lifecycle.

And that's exactly why this holistic approach is so important for especially the asset lifecycle optimization, because infrastructure assets do not operate independently.

They actually cooperate vehicles and infrastructure and also the conditions constantly influence in each other.

And that's why it's so important that we take all these influencing factors into consideration regarding optimizing our assets.

And exactly with this complete view on our asset health that combines monitoring data with the asset and maintenance data, we can make better data-driven decisions and really optimize the asset lifecycle.

And this is what we can do.

But also, as we can see in railway infrastructure nowadays, there still happens to be fragmentation.

And this fragmentation, does it happen more in the data itself, in responsibilities or in the systems?

In my opinion, it's in all of these three areas.

In data, in responsibilities, as well as in the systems.

Because data is stored in separate databases, they do not communicate well with each other, making it difficult to gain a unified view on the network.

Also, in regard to responsibilities, they are often split between multiple stakeholders, such as infrastructure managers, asset managers, operators, authorities, and these lead to misalignment and slow decision-making, And that's why it's so important that you have a system in place that helps you to overcome exactly these challenges.

And also these system silos, which currently or nowadays are very common in the rail infrastructure, create barriers.

like different technologies or different standard in use, and these are not fully compatible.

So that's why it's so important that this combination of data responsibilities and systems are well aligned.

And as a result, then you can really improve the integration across all three areas is very essential for achieving exactly what we want to achieve.

More efficient tracks, more efficient railway infrastructure asset, and of course, increasing reliability.

Let's go into more detail with these silos that you just mentioned.

What exactly happens if the infrastructure is managed in silos instead of one whole system?

So when you manage the infrastructure into silos, the problem is that all these silos are independently working.