The business case for remote monitoring applications

As remote condition monitoring systems have become more reliable, user-oriented and generating fewer false alarms, railways are still left with the thorny issue of preparing investment papers to justify their procurement. Modern RCM systems deployed in a railway trackside environment are still few in number worldwide and without very many years of accumulated data, hard evidence to support business cases is still quite hard to come by. There are some straightforward cases, for example where the cost of a manned visit to track, with attendant trackside safety risk, can be saved by having the information available remotely. However to prove the case that train delays have been saved is still dependent on data that is still fairly sparse, and open to some difficult questions: those faced with justifying business cases have to deal with such issues as overlapping claims for saving the same failure, and indeed making a convincing case that a failure would have resulted without the alert from the RCM system. Over the last 5 years, CDSRail has built up considerable experience in this respect with its AssetWatch system in the UK and overseas, and in a number of applications including PCM, signalling event analysis, level crossing monitoring, earth leakage detection, leaf fall contamination, rail temperature etc.