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.

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. 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

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.

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.

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Alistair Morrison ALSTOM Australia Maintenance & Asset Management

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.

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.

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 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 Maintenance & Asset Management

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 (milli-seconds) Each of the display boxes have reset buttons, which are used by the maintenance staff to reset the count after a service is completed. 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. 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. 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

The log file to be retrieved is selected using a date and time range, providing a given period to be played back.

This window allows the operator to select the required dates to be used in the play back function. 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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Alistair Morrison ALSTOM Australia Maintenance & Asset Management

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, non-critical 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 alarm on not acknowledged Steady red alarm on acknowledged

Flashing green alarm off not acknowledged If an alarm is acknowledged and is then cleared, it can be removed from the list without further action required. Alarms can be associated with calling other programs and can be used to sound an audible alarm, based on its attributes. 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.

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SUMMARY INTRODUCTION