Track Circuit Monitoring

Context

In the railway industry, track circuits are simple electrical devices used to detect the presence or absence of a train on rail tracks, in order to inform signalers and to control relevant signals. They are critical devices for operations and safety. A track circuit breakdown produces service interruption, high (maintenance) costs and delay for passengers.

Therefore, Alpha Innovations’ site monitoring (Compas) and multi-site management (Armada) solutions are used to surveil critical parameters of the devices, identify failure patterns and anticipate breakdowns. In other words, our solutions are used for preventive and predictive maintenance.

The Challenges of Track Circuit Monitoring

Track circuit devices are placed every 1 or 2 kilometers along railways. For a territory such as Belgium, it makes more than 16.000 devices scattered on the network (excluding metros and trams).

These devices are specific and highly critical: they must be monitored in real time from the control room and be accessible anywhere. The generated alarms, events and big data must be accurate, structured and fully manageable whether by operators or by external systems.

How do we answer these challenges?

On sites

Compas, Alpha Innovations’ site monitoring and control solution, is physically connected in real time to 6 pairs of track circuit devices. It acts like an edge device, locally structuring and preprocessing the signal coming from the 12 track circuits.
At this site level it offers:

• Responsive web interface (via any device, PC, tablet and/or smartphone)
• Comprehensive dashboards: general supervision and general data analysis
• Logs and reports
• Configurable alarms and notifications

Centrally

Armada, Alpha Innovations’ multi-site management solution connects in real-time to all Compas on the territory: gathering, structuring, processing all data, and offering relevant access to maintenance & operations teams, as well as external systems.

For central maintenance management, Armada offers:

• Creation, modification and management of alerts, alarms & events – Globally, by cluster or by site
• Creation, modification, management of global dashboards & reports
• Full & open data access
• Remote configuration and update of site controllers – Globally, by cluster, by site

Thanks to a full mobile web access, remote teams benefit from the same features. Particularly, Armada allows a full and secured access of any local site web interface (through Armada web interface).

To sum it up…

Compas and Armada provide a real-time and continuous view of your infrastructure. While Compas is focusing on a specific area, Armada manages the whole infrastructure. It enables to detect problems within a specific cabinet and act to improve its efficiency, correct any deficiencies that may exist or plan a maintenance. Everything remotely. This is what preventive maintenance means to us.

How could Alpha do it?

• High capability to connect to anything
• Agility, capacity to adapt to any niche requirement
• Utmost quality and reliability
• Mastering the hardware, as well as the software
• Decades of expertise in rail solutions

Nobody knows more about your systems than you. That’s why we offer numerous configurations and customizations to select exactly what you need.

What’s in it for you?

The most important issue for the railway sector is the repair time. With our monitoring and control solutions, you can continuously see the status of your system to anticipate breakdowns and avoid unnecessary service interruptions. Therefore, by doing preventive maintenance you have a reduced downtime.

As our monitoring system can perform several tasks automatically (e.g. remote repair or update), your team can focus on what’s really important.

Finally, all the collected information helps you to do more than just monitor, it allows you to optimize your operations, your efficiency and energy consumption.