Research on Luleå Railway Research Center
Within the framework of JVTC's business plan, a large number of projects are carried out. For these, JVTC has full responsibility to deliver quality and benefits back to the client.
The majority of these projects are conducted at the Division of Operation and Maintenance Engineering. JVTC also acts as a facilitator for all railway research at LTU. Some projects are handled directly between LTU units and clients. These projects can often have a different focus area than JVTC's i.e. operation and maintenance.
Strategic research and innovation programs
The strategic direction of the research and innovation programs is to develop new tools, methods and models that will facilitate innovative solutions to improve and strengthen the railway system.
The strategic direction of the research programs is to ensure increased availability, capacity, safety and sustainability of the railway system for efficient operation and maintenance.
Extensive research is ongoing to study track maintenance and renewal issues with a focus on grinding, lubrication, maintenance strategies and degradation.
Supporting technologies and solutions are used together with strong domain knowledge to develop optimizing technologies and solutions for operation and maintenance. By applying transformative technologies, the goal is to ensure increased availability, capacity, safety and sustainability of the railway system.
Areas included in JVTC's R&I program aim to find answers to the key research question: How to estimate the remaining lifetime of railway components and systems under a specific operating condition? This will facilitate the development of predictive technologies and solutions for the railway sector and facilitate proper decision making leading to effective maintenance planning. The transformative technologies will also facilitate finding the answer to the question "What should be done, how should it be done and who should do it?". It will facilitate the development of recommendations for action through analytics and tools, ultimately facilitating optimized allocation of maintenance resources and execution of maintenance tasks.
The JVTC Engineering and Management Program describes the JVTC competence areas required to solve the challenges of the railway industry. Providing competence to the programs is ensured through education and research at LTU.
Four focus areas
RAM4S
RAM4S (Reliability, Availability, Maintainability, Safety, Security, Supportability and Sustainability), characteristics of a railway system that can be described with which probability a guaranteed agreed traffic volume with defined quality in a given period can be achieved. With increasing demands from society, infrastructure owners and train operators need to improve the RAMS properties of their systems. Over the last 10 years, RAMS issues have become crucial for the competitiveness and economic viability of railway systems worldwide.
Currently, JVTC is engaged in projects that have a direct or indirect focus on RAMS analysis. Some of these projects are within the framework of the EU H2020 Program and JVTC is one of the most knowledgeable academic actors for the analysis of RAMS for railway systems.
Condition monitoring and condition-based maintenance
The concept of 'maintenance limits' is an innovative way of looking at the operation and maintenance of the railway system as a single entity to ensure high reliability of the transport system. The concept is based on and analogous to safety limits that have been used for many decades. The term maintenance limits is used to show that the maintenance decision should be based on the knowledge of degradation rates and taken in time to avoid corrective maintenance.
Maintenance limits also imply that the total cost of maintaining the rails and wheels combined should be used as a parameter for maintenance decisions. Currently JVTC has several ongoing projects in this area.
Asset Management, Risk & Human Factors
The importance of the concept and application of the human factor in maintenance management for railway infrastructure is accepted as a more important area. Human errors play an important role in the safety of railway infrastructure. In issues such as, human-machine-machine interface combined with ergonomics, it is important to find innovative solutions. Factors such as increased capacity, reliability and availability of the railway infrastructure require support in terms of knowledge and skills development.
Research projects related to human factors, focus on increasing the capacity of existing railway infrastructure through efficient maintenance processes.
The overall aim of this part of the program is to help the Swedish railway sector to increase its competitiveness by improving maintenance work processes, safety and reduction of human factors and/or errors in maintenance work by implementing human factors principles. The basic objective of human factors work is that all artificial tools, devices, equipment, machines and environments should develop, directly or indirectly, the safety, well-being and performance of humans.
Industrial AI and eMaintenance
The overarching objective of the Industrial AI/eMaintenance Research Program is to enable the railway industry to achieve operation excellence. This through a) conduct multi-disciplinary applied research in maintenance analytics; b) develop and provide an appropriate education platform in eMaintenance; c) establish an innovation process which supports implementation of research outcomes to real-world applications. eMRP focuses on topics which reflect issues and challenges within industry and academia. Some of these topics are: Industrial Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, Deep Learning, eXplainable AI, service-oriented and event- oriented approaches, digitalisation, IoT and IIoT, Big Data Analytics, cloud computing, distributed computing, crowd sourcing, information logistics, data integration, data fusion, data processing, data visualisation, and context adaptation. The program also aims to design, develop, and provide artefacts based on edge technology to demonstrate proof-of-concept within the topics. The main objective of these demonstrators is to validate academic outcome in industrial contexts. To achieve this, EMRP collaborate with the eMaintenance LAB.
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