Project Summary
The enhancement of lift services is crucial for disabled passengers to access railway stations. The project aims to improve the existing lift system, providing disabled individuals with reliable and stress-free travel on the rail network. Leonard Cheshire, a UK disability charity, found that the inaccessibility of the country’s rail network is a significant barrier for disabled people seeking employment. This project uses an innovative monitoring approach that is more efficient, less disruptive, and allows for quicker asset maintenance. Our approach involves transitioning from individual asset data collection to a unified monitoring system capable of detecting minor changes, using running signature analysis and real-time visualisation during onsite maintenance to facilitate proactive maintenance.
Project Achievements
W o d a T n b d The key innovation within this project is the development of hardware which can read existing internal signals from asset controllers and when coupled with algorithms capable of detecting minor changes in signal structure as the asset moves through its normal activity sequence enabling proactive maintenance strategies to be developed. The aim is to identify/predict the potential cause of failure before the asset stops and develop a maintenance strategy to improve reliability & optimise maintenance cost. We have been able throughout this project to validate the concept of simple lift data collection techniques, together with a user interface that shows lift real time and historic data, with the ability to detect minor changes in running signature and raise alerts requesting containment/corrective action prior to actual lift failure in service.
Conclusions
We have achieved the outcomes and outputs we expected. Now, being able to read outputs directly from lift controllers, our research and development will continue to develop monitoring technologies that are bespoke to clients requirements, giving access to their data, displayed and analysed to suit their business needs. The support we have received from the TRIG team has been enormously beneficial not just in delivering the project, but in helping us develop our business. There has been a genuine interest in us being successful, challenging what we do and how we do it.
Next Steps
A key priority is to move forward is to achieve TRL 9, by disseminating our outputs through the Connected Places Catapult and Department for Transport , both have a position in the rail sector and experience in integrating new technologies into complex rail facilities. The Department for Transport have a key business objective in putting the passenger first, provides us with a platform for a route to market by being able to demonstrate we have a remote monitoring system ready for commercial deployment. To achieve TRL 9, further testing will be required across a number of lifts to reflect different OEM’s age and type. This will be supported by outputs that include demonstrator sites, comparative studies showing business benefits and expected ROI, technical reports, specifications and installation manuals. By providing a common communication protocol we intend to extend our monitoring application across all assets across the tran sport infrastructure have asset controllers including lifts, escalators, ventilation/HVAC system identical to those we are monitoring now. Up until our TRIG project all R&D has been self funded. To enable us to achieve significant growth and develop a route to market, we need to seek additional funding.
