Bringing Connected Transportation to India
The Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) as a concept, has
revolutionized the way different industries have been operating, tremendously
improving the operational efficiency and hence the productivity. The integration
of sensors into the existing industrial environments helps in the remote
monitoring of the systems, thereby reducing human intervention and facilitating
real-time, non-real-time and near real time interventions. By introducing
sensors into conventional systems and using the Cloud platform to gather all
this voluminous data and analyzing it, the age old industrial assets can be
turned into building blocks of a connected Smart Community.
One such area is the railroads network. This blog post by Vinod
(http://www.infosysblogs.com/engineering-services/2018/01/all_aboard_the_smart_train.html#more
) gives an overview of the potential of such as platform. Among the different
modes public transport, railways would be the best bet to implement an IIoT
solution, since we already have a dependable and exclusive infrastructure in place
and only a specific type of traffic to tackle, unlike the road transport.
Consider the Indian Railways, one of the largest in the
world, yet one of the least safe. The official report for 2015-16 reveals some
shocking statistics (http://164.100.47.193/lsscommittee/Railways/16_Railways_12.pdf
). Let's try and fit an IoT solution in the context of Indian Railways and try
to analyze what it takes to turn our Indian Railways into a smarter system,
prioritizing passenger safety over anything else.
There are two aspects of passenger safety - one is about the
train itself (with all the passengers and their baggage) reaching the final
destination safely and the other is about each passenger having a safe and
comfortable journey inside a coach. Let us consider the different factors
leading to both these aspects of passenger safety -
1)
A safe journey
Every year hundreds of lives are lost in train accidents,
and the sad fact is that most of them are due to recurrent mistakes and human
error. A majority of these accidents are due to -
b) Unmanned level crossings
c) Lack of timely track maintenance
d) Sabotage
All of the above can be effectively tackled by using an
integrated Cloud platform solution (E.g. EdgeLINC from GET https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20171024005536/en/GE-Transportation-Unveils-EdgeLINC%E2%84%A2-Software-Advances-Industrial).
The locomotives would have sensors that continuously gather information about
different parameters like speed, position, temperature of different parts etc.
and send it over to the Cloud where rule based analytics is run on this data, resulting
in signaling information. This information would be more accurate and can be
used to automate the signaling process, with zero human intervention. It can
also be used to control the unmanned level crossings. The locomotives can also
have a crash hardened system (something like a black box in an aircraft) that
can be used to save all the event logs for further analysis. These will give
meaningful insights into the actual cause of the accidents in cases where the
root cause is difficult to ascertain using the existing means.
The record of the health of tracks can be used for
preventive maintenance of tracks, minimizing the chances of derailment.
2)
A comfortable journey
The safety of the passenger and baggage within a coach is
another important aspect because most of the trains operated by Indian Railways
run for more than 24 hours through different vulnerable areas. Major security
concerns are -
b) Air quality within the coach
c) Medical/Police assistance with minimal delay etc.
One solution could be to have cameras in the coaches that
would inhibit thefts. Given the number of coaches and that there are numerous
compartments within a coach that have to be monitored, the choice of cameras
and their numbers should be decided considering the trade-offs. This would
generate huge volumes of data, and so the duration of syncing them with the
Cloud etc. has to be considered. Cameras
can also be used to discourage unsafe passenger movement in and out of moving
trains.
Air quality sensors that would help check the levels of
harmful gases should be installed within the coaches. The data from these
sensors could be used by simple rule based analytic engines onboard the
locomotive, to warn about the likely presence of smoke or poisonous gases and
other potentially dangerous pollutants.
All this information about the safety features within a
coach and SOS services of doctors or Police can also be made available to every
passenger via a mobile app.
Safe modes of public transport is the need of the hour
especially in a growing economy like ours. We already have advanced technology
packaged into a solution that can be applied to railways. GE Transportation
(GET), one of the world leaders in railroad transportation, is working on the
idea of Transportation Intelligence which is suite of a number of IoT solutions
aimed at making railroad transportation more efficient and safe. Infosys is
collaborating with GET on many of these cutting edge solutions. It includes
equipping the locomotives with hardware capable of storing different events,
cameras to continuously monitor the surroundings and the loco pilot's cabin,
high performance computing platform to connect with the Cloud, event and rule
based analysis of real-time data etc. More details can be found at https://www.ge.com/digital/industries/transportation
.
With proper planning and political will, we definitely can
turn Indian Railways into one of the safest in the world.