TCS Intelligent Rail Bridge Inspection

Overview

Railroad industry is transitioning from a scheduled and reactive maintenance regime to intelligent, proactive, and predictive maintenance.

Asset servitization is, therefore, emerging as a new business model, with machine vision becoming an accepted way to leverage technology in enterprise asset maintenance. An AI-ML-based solution delivered in a pay-as-you-go or business process service (BPS) mode of delivery can help railroad companies achieve automation in visual bridge inspection processes and ensure intelligent asset maintenance.

TCS Intelligent Rail Digital Maintenance is an umbrella solution offering advanced analytics that transform railway assets maintenance to a condition-based, predictive regime. It leverages state-of-the-art technologies such as machine vision, non-vision sensors, AI-ML, and deep learning. Its bridge inspection module uses a combination of drones with these technologies to automate the inspection process, monitor assets, predict defects, and prevent untimely failures of railway assets.

The heavy dependence of the transportation industry on bridges makes them a crucial and valuable asset for modern infrastructure. Extending the useful service life of aging bridges is a critical issue. They require continuous inspection through a safety assessment and condition documentation. However, the ownership and maintenance of equipment for bridge inspection involve significant expenses to access the various areas of the bridge. Furthermore, depending on the location and design of the bridge, traffic might have to be rerouted or stopped to perform the inspection properly. Inspecting bridges is also a dangerous process and can cause fatal accidents if a worker falls from a great height. Further, 100% inspection is not possible manually, as it is difficult to check all portions of a bridge.

A key module of TCS Intelligent Rail Digital Maintenance is TCS Intelligent Rail Bridge Inspection solution, which automates the visual bridge inspection process to identify defects early and eliminate any breakdown maintenance scenarios. Offered as a license-based product or cloud-based solution or service in a pay-as-you-go model, the solution can recognize objects made of concrete and steel or metal and detect anomalies in them to ensure automated bridge inspection and intelligent asset maintenance.

Our Solution

TCS Intelligent Rail Bridge Inspection solution offers the following features:

• AI Enabled automation: Leverage the AI Enabled automation, machine vision platform for railway assets to take images and videos from various angles and process them with a parallel processing engine. Train the system for newer objects and anomalies with built-in models with easy interfaces.
• Command center: Acquire a 360-degree view of all exceptions captured and enable a workflow-based mechanism to ensure the exceptions are converted into maintenance orders, assigned to relevant personnel, and tracked till closure. It enables integration with Enterprise Asset Management Systems (SAP and IBM Maximo).
• Predictive analytics: Generate 3D digital models of the bridge for comparison, identification of faults, and future developments. Scan through hundreds of bridge structure images over a period and use the data to extrapolate when failure can occur to prevent possible disasters. Historical data management enables predictive and prescriptive asset maintenance.