Making sense of remote condition monitoring for operations and incident management

In many applications, remote condition monitoring (RCM) is perceived and therefore designed as being for maintenance use only. However, RCM can be an effective operational tool in the day to day management of plant. Supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) systems for railways employ a high degree of remote control and include RCM functionality in systems for use by operators. This facilitates central monitoring, gives operators information they need on system performance, and permits efficient use of maintenance resources. The integration, selection and presentation of RCM data to the operators makes a great difference in how useful RCM can be in operations and incident management, and how it may contribute to the safe resolution of incidents. This paper examines means of optimising the integration, selection and presentation of RCM data to ensure that it achieves these objectives