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The Indian Railways is deploying data loggers in a major way for predictive maintenance, safety enhancement and for implementing computerised control charting.
Data loggers log data pertaining to operation of points, signals, track circuits involved in setting up of a route and their restoration during and after the passage of a train, Chief Communication Engineer of North Frontier Railway, R C Adwal, said.
This data accumulates with the passage of every new train, he said. Data loggers log data pertaining to fluctuation of various voltages (both DC and AC) required for operation of signalling assets.
Further, the incidents pertaining to failure of individual equipment such as point, track circuit and signal are also recorded by data loggers, Adwal said.
In the past, there was no user-friendly miscellaneous information system to use this data for predictive maintenance and safety enhancement.
It was because of this that the need to develop the MIS report generation software arose. The North-Frontier Railway is the first railway to develop this software with the help of Effronics Ltd.
The NF railway developed the software of selective reports of unusual events categorised on the basis of department, equipment, etc for a desired period and set of stations.
The type of report, department, station or set of stations and periods are all selectable by users, Adwal said.
Adwal said the software is already in use by data loggers deployed on Lumding Division and in due course would be deployed on other divisions of NF Railway as well.
The software has built-in reference sequences caused due to undesirable operations of various relays which correspond to activation of field equipment such as points, signals, track circuits, etc.
These have been built-in for all types of undesirable operations which may take place at stations, he said.
When used on data logged by a data logger, the software compares the sequences of relay operation with reference sequences and picks up all undesirable sequences and records them in the database under various heads with time and data stamp making it possible to generate selective reports, Adwal said.
With the application of the MIS software, handling of multiple control sections is possible in the software.
When data loggers of different control sections are connected to one Fault Analysis System, any one of the control section or all sections can be selected in the main menu and reports are generated.
The other features of this software include preparation of summary of repeat event and analysis of preventive maintenance for failures at stations.
A database can be built for each type of failure, Adwal said.
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