Ways to Deal with Frequent Train Breakdowns in Singapore

Frequent train breakdowns have been a hot topic in Singapore for the past few years. Singaporeans are dissatisfied by the frequent breakdowns as it causes disruption to schedules and loses productivity hours. An IoT platform, which enables predictive maintenance techniques is the likely solution to this problem. With millions of data points captured and transmitted from sensors on critical train components, analytics can monitor the degradation of parts and detect impending parts’ failures. They can then fix the part ahead of time, instead of waiting for it to break down, causing delays. The benefit of the ongoing analysis of predictive maintenance is that the maintenance is “right-time,” occurring well before a fault but not unnecessarily early, so the lifespan of the part is optimized.

Hitachi’s Lumada and Railway Predictive Maintenance Hitachi has developed the Lumada internet of things platform. As a vertically integrated IoT platform, Lumada is designed to manage the entire life cycle of different types of assets and devices. It measures real-time performances, builds a statistically representative data set along the useful life of the asset, and performs technical and financial forecasts and optimizations. Its modular and flexible architecture, along with public application programming interfaces (APIs), allows the implementation of third-party solutions (both proprietary and open source) even if already installed within the existing framework.

Using its data ingestion tools, Lumada can visualize data coming from assets, store those on an SQL database and/or on big data platforms. It can analyze the entire data lake through artificial intelligence and machine learning tools, implementing a specific workflow as a response to achieved results, and integrating with corporate IT systems. The modular approach does not deal just with integrable functions within the ecosystem. It also handles the scalability in terms of types and amount of monitorable devices, letting you add and remove assets without affecting the global availability of the solution.

Even more advanced than solving train breakdowns fast is to be able to predict the lifespan and usage of the equipment so that it can be replaced before it breaks down, so there will never be breakdowns. And for such an adventurous goal to be achieved, an entire ecosystem must be well-thought out and put in place, and that is what Lumada aims to be. This is the future of the industries, and if Singapore wants to keep up, this is the way to go. No more complaints about SMRT, no need for alternative shuttle buses, train delays. Productivity of the many working people and students who take public transportation daily will not be affected, and may even increase with a smooth and seamless commute.