Singapore taps data analytics to better manage rail systems
Singapore is looking to build a rail management platform that will consolidate its existing tracking systems and tap data analytics to monitor and identify potential faults. The country's Land Transport Authority (LTA) dished out a contract worth S$18.8 million (US$13.7 million) to a consortium formed by Siemens and ST Engineering Electronics (STEE), which would design and deploy the rail enterprise asset management system.
The new platform will consolidate LTA's existing asset information and maintenance records, which currently are tracked racked across multiple systems operating on individual rail lines. The consolidation will enable the government agency to better monitor Singapore's entire rail system, LTA said in a statement Monday.
It added that the new management platform would be equipped with data analytics capabilities, so potential faults could be identified before they occurred, enabling rail assets to be repaired and replaced pre-emptively.
LTA said: "This shift towards data-driven just-in-time predictive maintenance and asset renewal is key to bringing rail reliability to the next level, and optimising overall lifecycle costs."
Deployment would begin with the Downtown Line, with the system's core functions expected to be operational by mid-2020. The Siemens-STEE consortium would build a software to store and analyse data from the Downtown Line's maintenance management system and network of 92 trains across six systems.
Following the initial deployment, the rail management system would be expanded to other rail lines in phases, LTA said.
Singapore's mass rapid transit (MRT) system had been plagued with multiple delays and service disruptions in recent years, which included a malfunctioning water pumping system that flooded an MRT tunnel last October, causing a two-day disruption on the North-South Line that affected 231,000 commuters.