Professional Documents
Culture Documents
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.
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.
Signal lamps
Point machines
Point detection
Level crossings
Track circuits
Trainstops
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Data logging
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
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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.
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.
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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.
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
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
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.
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