The next generation of railway crossing asset management technology

ongoing

Railway crossings degrade significantly faster than plain line track, with lifespans commonly lasting less than 5 years despite their design lives typically being 15 years. This results in Billions of Euros being spent on unplanned corrective maintenance, crossing renewals and delay-minutes, which would not occur if they could be better managed to reach their design lives. XCROSS will develop a suite of integrated disruptive technologies which combine to provide a technological process for the monitoring, inspection, and maintenance intervention of crossing surface profiles. To achieve the objectives, new crossing inspection techniques will be developed using 3D laser scanning technology and computer vision to allow for fast, repeatable and high accuracy crossing measurement. These 3D scans will then be used to create digital twins (DT) of the crossing, embedded with advanced wheel-rail interaction calculation algorithms. Considering these wheel forces and also on-site practical maintenance constraints, the digital twin will use optimisation strategies to calculate the optimal geometry profile achievable via on-site welding and grinding techniques in terms of lifecycle cost. Then, to enable practical implementation of the calculated optimum crossing profile geometries, Augmented Reality (AR) and 3D printing techniques will be developed to provide visualisation guides for on-site welding and grinding. These technologies will allow the maintenance engineers to see their welding and grinding progress ‘live’, and thus be an enabler for a step-change in the quality control of crossing interventions. Lastly, an early warning system will also be developed to act as the initial trigger for the deployment of the 3D scanning, AR and 3D printing. It is vital for detecting the early signs of degradation and thus initiating the deployment of the new maintenance process before the onset of irreparable degradation.