Maintenance & Asset Management

Alistair Morrison
National Sales & Business Development Manager
Information Solution, ALSTOM Australia
SUMMARY
The scope of this paper is to promote discussion and review of the maintenance processes and tools used to
manage Rail network Assets. This paper looks at the processes used for signalling systems, but they can be
applied to other industries and processes.
With the introduction of computer based systems utilising serial communications and multi-layered
databases for Real-time and Static information, tools can be created to track the data in both forms, to
provide positive feedback to maintenance and asset management staff.

stamped with each bit change and graph form to

view sequence and timing related issues.
Providing automatic alarms and messages to
prompt maintenance staff when particular events
(eg equipment operation counts have exceeded
a threshold level) have occurred.

INTRODUCTION
As part of the introduction of ALSTOMs computer
based SigView control system at Blacktown,
maintenance and fault finding were identified as
requiring more attention.
With the system information being transferred using
serial links, the maintenance staff were unable to
see the fault status of various field equipment.
ALSTOM were aware of the situation and sought to
find a solution to the problem.
The solution was to provide a workstation that has
the tools and facilities to monitor, track and trend the
field equipment, providing special alarms for a range
of field based duration or count conditions.

DESCRIPTION
The basic building block of maintenance and asset
management is to determine how the field
equipment is performing and provide the tools and
facilities to help the maintenance staff to respond in
a timely manner without impacting operation of train
services where possible.

Equipment recording and monitoring

Signalling equipment that requires to be monitored
includes:
-

Signal lamps
Point machines
Point detection
Level crossings
Track circuits
Trainstops

Lamp data can be used to analyse the expected

operating life cycle of bulbs, which can provide data
to initiate lamp changeouts during scheduled
quarterly inspections of signals.

The field equipment status data can be displayed to

the maintenance support staff, so that it can assist
them to determine the operating condition of the field
devices. This data can also be recorded and
presented to the maintenance staff to determine how
frequently the field equipment needs servicing or
replacement.
The key issues are recording and display:
-

Recording of control and field telemetry data.

The recording is activated by the configuration of
the basic control system software, with the
actual data stored on various servers.
Presentation to the user 3 modes were
identified as being helpful to the user. Replay
back onto the same views as the operator
workstations, list form with actual date and time

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Maintenance & Asset Management

Alistair Morrison ALSTOM Australia

Point machines, may be tracked for the following:

- Number of operations
- Current load (If wired)
- Time to operate
This information can assist by providing a clearer
picture of when a point machine requires to be
overhauled or if there is a trend of a problem starting
to show. This will allow the maintenance staff to
schedule their maintenance prior to it actually failing
in service.
Point detection, is traditionally monitored and
displayed on the signallers panel or VDU. More can
be done by tracking this data by counting point
operations and determining point operating times.
By tracking each point operation with a counter,
which is incremented each time the points are
operated, an alarm can be raised when the count
exceeds a preset threshold. By monitoring the time
of point operation with a timer, which starts when the
point control is issued and stops when the detection
is returned, an alarm can be raised when the time
exceeds a preset threshold. These alarms will help
the maintenance staff to plan and schedule their
maintenance if the units are operating above or
below the average frequency or there is some
deterioration in operation performance. The
thresholds can be adjusted individually for each set
of points.

Trainstops, as with the points detection, the

operational condition can be determined from the
frequency and duration of its operations. By using
counters and timers, maintenance staff can plan and
schedule their maintenance.

Data logging

Level crossing equipment control and detection can

be monitored similarly to points machine operation,
providing feedback to the maintenance staff of its
operational status.

General note:
The data entered as the default is usually obtained
from the maintenance procedures of the respective
rail maintenance operators.
Track circuits can generate a number of alarms.
There are a number of common alarms such as
SPAD (Signal Pass At Danger), track sequence
alarms, and additional functions such as operation
counts, total duration in both states, track down no
route set (based on interlocking functions), etc.
IRSE Technical Convention: Sydeny

All data is logged to disk on the servers, and is

retrieved via the maintenance workstation as
required. The logs are rolled over after a
predefined time or volume size (eg 30 days or 2Gb
stored).
Tools are available to report to the maintenance staff
the Log status such as 80% full, allowing him the
time to backup to an external source if required.
Storage medium
The data is stored as it is received by the servers,
and is written to files on the server hard disk.
The file sizes are configurable, previously this was
1.44MB for transfer to a floppy disk but with
CDRoms available now the size is only limited by the
size of the CDROM or to a managable size for use
by a third party software for interrogation.

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Alistair Morrison ALSTOM Australia

The data is held by the server for a fixed time such

as 30 days or by volume of stored data 500MB or
greater. The limit of this is based on the hard disk
size within the computer.
The format of the data can take various forms, but
the internal format uses the least amount of disk
space.
A description of the format is available on request.
Storage format
Each change of state is logged to a file with the
change direction, an identifier for the type of variable
(alarm, control, indication, etc), date and time (milliseconds)
Each of the display boxes have reset buttons, which
are used by the maintenance staff to reset the count
after a service is completed.
The log file to be retrieved is selected using a date
and time range, providing a given period to be
played back.

Presentation formats
Replay view
The primary viewing format is to replay the logged
data on the operator screens. This will provide a
mode of looking at the data that is the same as the
operators current mode of operation.

This window allows the operator to select the

required dates to be used in the play back function.

All the views available to the operators are available

on the maintenance workstation, with the control
buttons disabled for control, but will show activation
if logged.

Trend view
The trend view allows live and historical data to be
plotted onto a time based graph. Eight system data
bits can be simultaneously monitored providing a
means to compare the sequence and timing of their
changes of state.

A control panel is used to manage the replay of

logged data. This provides the tools to select the
data to replay, followed by actions on the data such
as :
- Fast-forward / reverse
- Jump to a entered time
- Slow forward / reverse
- one at a time
- Stop / pause / play

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Flashing green
This is only a brief look at the facilities of the
Trending display. During its initial operation at
Blacktown, within the first 3 weeks of service, this
tool facilitated the tracking down of a difficult
intermittent trainstop fault.

alarm off not acknowledged

If an alarm is acknowledged and is then cleared, it

can be removed from the list without further action
required.

List view
The list view is basically a view of the stored data in
list form. It is used for a quick reference to historic
data and can be done while the workstation is
monitoring the live system.
Data is shown with the date and time of each
change of state, variable name and/or program
name.

Alarms can be associated with calling other

programs and can be used to sound an audible
alarm, based on its attributes.

Alarms
As part of the control system base software, all
data bits can be declared alarms. This allows these
data bits to be grouped and displayed in an alarm
window.
It is good practice to group alarms into logical
groups, such as by interlocking, station area, field
device (eg signal, points) or by impact (eg critical,
non-critical). Critical will impact train running, noncritical requires attention but does not affect train
running. Other alarms are system alarms such as
workstation off-line or server change-over.
By grouping the alarms by domain (Area) or nature
(equipment), then the critical alarms can be shown in
the Critical alarm window, etc.
There are other ways of grouping and displaying
alarms, such as by operator area (with fixed
boundaries). These alarms would be viewed in the
appropriate operators alarm window.
The window setup limits what is shown in the alarm
window. It does not limit what can be shown in a
general window, which is available to be used by the
maintenance staff. They are able to view and action
all alarms.
All entries within the window can be managed to
allow filtering of alarms to long term alarms,
acknowledged (individual or a group) alarms, sort by
domain or nature.
Alarms are shown using colours to highlight their
current status. The following colours have been
used, for example:
Flashing red
Steady red

With all these features, the system has been linked

on other projects into an Asset management system
allowing real-time fault call-outs and management of
the asset from a central database. Further details
are available on request.

CONCLUSION
We have found that by addressing the needs of the
maintenance staff and the availability of actual and
readily accessible data, an effective tool can be
offered to assist and improve the management of the
asset and response to field based faults.

Credits
I would like to thank the management of ALSTOM
Australia for giving me the opportunity to submit this
paper, to provide information to the industry as to the
direction we see control systems moving in.

alarm on not acknowledged

alarm on acknowledged

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