Three takeaways from InnoTrans 2024
As the dust settles, it’s time to reflect on what was the largest InnoTrans yet. Held every two years, the scale of InnoTrans 2024 was particularly massive. A record-breaking 3000 exhibitors and 170,000 visitors were in Berlin for Europe’s largest transport technology trade fair. To put it in perspective, it took me 20 minutes to walk from the entrance of the event to our Arcadis booth!
And as always InnoTrans is a unique and important opportunity to engage with our clients and partners across the whole rail industry. Through presentations at our booth, and hosting our own client roundtable event, we were able to present our experience and expertise on one of the critical topics facing the industry: how to unleash the power of digitization and big data to reimagine the future of modern rail transport. And spark discussions with clients and partners on this topic.
Digitization is a major priority for all parties in the industry. Whether leveraging data to support asset management to make our railways safer and more efficient, to using data in a better way to improve systems to run those transit systems. But digitalizing our railways offers both opportunities and challenges. For instance, when implementing digitization to the entire rail network, where do you start? How do you make it tangible? And how do you build it up in a programmatic way so that it becomes a fundamental way of working? How do you engage the whole industry, all supply chain partners to actively contribute?
Here are three of my datafication and digitization takeaways from InnoTrans 2024:
Transitioning to data-driven engineering to achieve efficiencies and reduce costs
It all starts with datafication: from analogue to digital. From drawings to data. My Arcadis colleagues from LOXIA – an Arcadis and Movares JV, presented on how Asset Managers can make the transition in rail signalling from images to data-driven engineering.
This is a challenging journey. It requires a well-designed systematic approach, through clearly defined processes, tools and specifications. We showcased solutions to rail Asset Managers on how data and engineering of various infrastructure disciplines can be standardised and streamlined with the supply chain. Key elements are developing and filling an Object Type Library (OTL) and standardizing the engineering design chain by clearly defined exchange formats and protocols. This way, the asset related data work with unique identifiers and enable representation in schematic way, geographical and asset specific parametres. With the introduction of an independent and highly standardised data exchange format, the whole supply chain works with the same information and benefits from all data available.
Data-driven collaboration is crucial for future-proofing rail infrastructure management
Europe’s busy rail networks are expected to experience substantial challenges over the coming years as passenger volumes grow. Futureproofing rail infrastructure management requires digitalized logistics operations and data-driven collaboration across the entire ecosystem. We had many fruitful discussions with European clients and partners at InnoTrans on how to advance digital rail infrastructure through data-driven approaches.
It was great to be able to present DynDashTM (short for dynamic data sharing) to clients – our pioneering platform for rail collaboration in data driven design. DynDashTM integrates the various complex dimensions of rail design, making data visualization, manipulation, and verification both effortless and accessible.
Our demo brought to life how DynDashTM ensures uniform data interpretation across all rail disciplines by providing real-time design updates and enhanced collaboration, minimizing the number of human errors and reducing data handling effort. This consistency is crucial for managing the entire rail asset life cycle, from initial design to ongoing maintenance and eventual decommissioning.
Dramatic improvements of infrastructure performance are now within reach for Asset Managers
Rail infrastructure faults can cause delays to passenger and freight delivery, creating many challenges in safety, efficiency and passenger experience. But by applying performance-based maintenance principles, Asset Managers can greatly improve infrastructure performance. And performance-based maintenance leads to significantly lower operational costs, less disruptions and shorter recovery times.
In another presentation at our booth, we demonstrated our multi-year experience in applying performance-based maintenance principles to infrastructure maintenance, and how we managed to reduce the number of faults by more than 50% and slash repair times in half.
The key foundation for applying performance-based maintenance is in-depth knowledge and analysis of the abundance of information readily available, seamlessly integrating into the optimized maintenance workflow. The benefits of this analysis will come to life by a skilled and motivated workforce that lives through these principles.
As ever, InnoTrans was a great opportunity to meet and engage with clients and partners and to learn about the latest technological advances in the rail industry. It’d be great to hear from you on what your takeaways were from InnoTrans 2024?
