Feasibility study for automatic imaging of rail wagon condition.

Synopsis

Corus’ client is a UK engineering steels manufacturer who purchases large quantities of scrap steel as a key raw material in the production process. The scrap metal is transported to the client’s manufacturing plant by rail. Availability of rail wagons is a key issue; our client wanted to develop an automatic system to record rail wagon condition at the plant’s entry and exit points, with all recorded data to be stored in a central database and to be traceable using date/time/wagon ID stamping.

Key Client Issues

• Rail wagon condition entering and exiting site needed to be recorded
• Records had to be stored for up to 3 months and traceable/searchable by wagon ID, time and date
• An automatic system for capturing and recording the information was required as manual inspections were too costly and slowed down transfer of scrap metal
• Any technology developed had to be flexible as upgrades to other systems for recording wagon condition (wagon weighbridge, scrap radiation content) were planned

Solutions

Our client selected Corus because of our detailed understanding of digital video imaging and image acquisition within the rail industry, our railway domain knowledge and our project management capability.

Corus conducted a feasibility study and field trials using Radio Frequency identification (RFID) and Optical Character Recognition (OCR) combined with digital camera technology. The trials were very successful and lead to our client funding implementation of a full production-scale system.

Key client issues were addressed by:

• Conducting a review of potential technologies
• Developing a plan for field trials which would result in a full assessment of the wagon identification and image acquisition technology selected
• Ensuring successful site trials by carrying out comprehensive factory acceptance testing of the selected technologies
• Demonstrating a solution for automatic rail wagon condition recording with recommendations for scaling up the field trial to a system capable of monitoring the full wagon fleet, including costs and timescales for delivery

Client Benefits

• Confirmation that automatic rail wagon condition monitoring is possible
• Development of a full-scale monitoring system with additional costs over and above the feasibility field trials minimised
• Year-on-year cost savings of approximately £75,000 by successful implementation of a technology-based solution compared to manual inspections