EMaintenance solutions for railway maintenance decisions

The term eMaintenance emerged in the early 2000s and has become a popular topic in maintenance related literature because of ongoing technological improvements. This paper uses a recent approach, i.e. cloud-based technology, to provide an eMaintenance solution for online time data analysis to make effective and efficient railway maintenance decisions. Due to increased traffic, the Swedish railway sector needs to optimise maintenance, using predictive maintenance to a much higher degree so that unplanned breakdowns and downtime are drastically reduced. The paper shows how research within the railway sector is developing eMaintenance solutions using the cloud and web-based applications for improved condition monitoring, better maintenance and increased uptime. In the proposed solution, data are acquired from railway measurement stations and sent to the eMaintenance cloud, where they are filtered, fused, integrated and analysed to assist maintenance decisions. The paper provides a concept for a web-based eMaintenance solution to assist railway maintenance stakeholders make fact-based decisions and develop more efficient and economically sound maintenance policies.Validerad; 2015; Nivå 1; 20141007 (andbra)JVT