VR FleetCare and EKE-Electronics Collaborate to Provide Wider Range of Condition-Based Maintenance Solutions for Rolling Stock and Track Infra

Digitalisation is a major trend in rail transport and offers a lot of opportunities to improve maintenance operations.

To enable customers to take advantage of this, VR FleetCare and EKE-Electronics recently announced a collaboration of their sales and project implementation that will give customers access to a wider range of technical and support services for advanced condition-based maintenance solutions of trains and track infrastructure.

Specifically, the subject of the co-operation is a system for measuring the condition and operation of the bogie system of rolling stock and its subsystems, as well as the condition of the track from standard in-service trains.

We help our customers to transition from time-based maintenance to condition-based rolling stock and track maintenance

“With our SmartCare solutions, we help our customers to transition from time-based maintenance to condition-based rolling stock and track maintenance. The objective of the collaboration agreement with EKE-Electronics is to offer our customers digital solutions that can improve operational reliability, optimise track and rolling stock maintenance and reduce life cycle costs”, says Sami Kalevirta, Head of Digital Services at VR FleetCare.

Jointly developed system for remote condition monitoring
These solutions and their sophisticated analytics functionalities have been jointly developed and verified on commercial trains of VR Group running on the track of the Finnish Traffic Infrastructure Agency (FTIA) since 2019. They form a complete end-to-end condition monitoring solution enabling the implementation of condition-based maintenance for rolling stock and track infrastructure.

The system has already been able to detect several rail surface defects at their early stage when they are still easy to repair. Typically, this type of defects are observed by measurement trains only when the defect has spread to the supporting structures and require a larger maintenance operation.

We can now address the market with the developed solutions together with a full range of services offered from VR FleetCare

The services now offered by the VR FleetCare and EKE-Electronics collaboration provide end-to-end support for the lifetime of the project. This includes VR FleetCare’s experience in installation planning and supervision, regulatory permissions, maintenance process optimisation and monitoring services. EKE-Electronics’ scope includes the SmartVision™ remote condition monitoring system including measurement equipment with edge processing software, secure communications between train and wayside as well as cloud-based software for analytics and visualisation including on-going support services.

Karl Lönngren, Director of Digital Services at EKE-Electronics said “EKE-Electronics, and its British subsidiary Humaware, has benefited significantly from the development and field verification cooperation with VR FleetCare. With this new contract, we can now address the market with the developed solutions together with a full range of services offered from VR FleetCare, one of the front runners of deploying digitalisation in railway maintenance operations.”

InnoTrans 2022 Speaker’s Corner
VR FleetCare and EKE-Electronics will be organising a seminar in co-operation at InnoTrans’ Speaker’s Corner in Hall 27. The seminar will take place on Thursday September 22, at 11.30-12.30 (GMT+2) and the subject of the seminar is How to Digitalise Track and Train Maintenance Through the Power of Sisu.

The seminar will cover the benefits of machine learning in train operations and maintenance, finding a path from time-consuming routines to productive work and the results that the implementation of condition monitoring on railway infrastructure has had in Finland. The topics deal with questions such as how to obtain real-life information on the condition.

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