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Leveraging Digital Twins for Condition Monitoring in Railway Infrastructure

Authors:
Lucas Rocha
Gil Gonçalves

Keywords: rail transport; digital twin; monitoring; Industry 4.0.

Abstract:
Rail transport services are emerging as a major sustainable transportation option, especially in metropolitan areas. However, these services are significantly dependent on high investments and complex logistics, which creates the need to identify opportunities to minimize the waste of resources so that these services remain affordable and competitive. The digital twin, one of the core concepts of the Industry 4.0 paradigm, enables detailed, real-time monitoring of the state of a piece of equipment during its operation. For this reason, the digital twin represents an important support in ensuring sound decision making. This work seeks to explore the potential of the digital twin to support the monitoring of the conditions of railway vehicles and railroad infrastructure. First, a research was conducted on the implementations and studies of digital twins carried out in recent years. Next, two digital twin prototypes – a digital twin of a railway vehicle model, and another one for a section of a railroad - were developed. Both prototypes are composed of a relational database for storing the data on the operational conditions of the equipment, a mobile application that works as a dashboard of the digital between the application and the database. With the developed prototypes, it was possible to glimpse how the digital twin concept provides a deeper knowledge of the working conditions of the components of a train. Besides, the prototype also supports preventive maintenance through the analysis of the historical evolution of the data collected from these components. The results of this study also allow the identification of possible improvements and research opportunities for future work.

Pages: 18 to 24

Copyright: Copyright (c) IARIA, 2023

Publication date: September 25, 2023

Published in: conference

ISSN: 2519-8475

ISBN: 978-1-68558-096-4

Location: Porto, Portugal

Dates: from September 25, 2023 to September 29, 2023