Customer Use Case : Railroad Incident Awareness Solution

Railroad transportation industry has significantly important aspect in situational awareness and assessment as the trains run periodically on same tracks and infrastructure. Ongoing use cases are focused on optimizing field operations, maintenance and situational awareness on service-disrupting incidents.

• Topographical surveys, mapping; digital elevation maps, digital surface models,
• Maintenance and monitoring of the railroad network,
• Obstacle detection; trees in proximity to power lines, logs on tracks, fallen rocks
• Local inspection of sites, structures in 3D in 1 cm/pixel precision.
• Monitoring during the construction phase, and
• Emergency or crisis situational awareness, monitoring, coordination of field teams, tasks and work orders.

Based on the United States Department of Transportation (DOT)  statistics on the number of fatalities by mode of transportation, railway transportation is the 2nd risky infrastructure. The recent accident on railways has happened in Çorlu, Turkey on the 8th of July 2018. More than 20 people lost their lives and over 300 people were injured.

CRITICAL PROBLEMS

Unexpected Disruptions & Change in Land

Heavy rainfall, natural disasters and other environmental factors lead to landslides underneath and around tracks, obstacles(fallen rocks and trees) on train tracks.

Accidents

Unaware trains pass through damaged and affected areas, causing accidents and catastrophic disasters.

SOLUTION and OPERATIONS

Aerial & Ground Operations

We define the optimum aerial and ground data collection plan via UAVs missions, satellites or IoT/Sensors,cameras placed on the ground.

Precision Aerial Data

Cloud Ararat UAVs autonomously gather 1cm/pixel aerial data. Raw data are uploaded to the cloud based Connected Ops software. TBs of data are processed based on business requirements and output is SIMPLIFIED actionable data for decision making.

End-to-End Integration

We integrate all operations, data and assets with the clients’ systems to operate smoothly and to maximize the benefits throughout the organization.

OUTPUT and ACTIONABLE DATA

Proactive Signal & Systems Notification

Our Connected Ops SaaS systems automatically identifies threats, obstacles and risks while proactively notifying the geo-located railroad signalization systems to stop trains before the incident location.

Proactive Field Team Management

Connected Ops SaaS system automatically and proactively creates work orders, notifies the railroad field teams to bring necessary tools to remove obstacles.

Maps, GIS, Mission Data & Operations Management

On top of all the simplified data, we do share Maps, mission data, assets, signalization, sensor data,  field jobs, team locations…etc to be viewed, analyzed and shared via web and mobile apps as necessary and required.

Massive Amount of Raw Data Collected

Do you really need the Data?

Let’s discuss the collected, processed and output data. The raw aerial image data collected for 30 kilometers of railway exceeds 15GB. Whether Cloud or local infrastructure utilized, that is a huge data load to process and create various outputs in 3D, maps, surface models…etc.  So, having data can help us to identify the challenges and the cause but can’t help us to prevent it in real-time.

Cloud Ararat is an Actionable Intelligence company. We collect aerial raw data via various payloads on our UAV’s/drones and via satellite partners, then process the raw data to create actionable intelligence for right people.

In this scenario discussed here, collected raw data size is approximately 15 GB. Using cloud computing resources, processing optimized GPUs and IOPS optimized processing throughput, we process the data within few minutes/hours based on the requirement, then the output is usually a 10KB of notification to signalization, 1 MB of work order or GBs of maps, depending on the users.

It is extremely important to identify the business requirements and output first, than the technologies aligned behind it.

WE HELP YOU FOCUS ON YOUR CORE BUSINESS

Our passion is to understand your business problems, then craft the optimum solution consisting of collection & processing of aerial and ground data, providing actionable intelligence and tools for you to manage your business operations. As a result, we allocate technical and business teams to assist you to make solid strategic decisions.

Integrated Solutions

We offer tailor-made  Aerial Intelligence and Connectivity Solutions for Transportation Infrastructure Operations, especially for railways. With fully autonomous, long endurance UAVs we have built, now we can inspect around 60 kilometers per hour per UAV with tested range of 80km. Unmanned aerial systems provide safer, affordable, and easy-to-operate alternative to manned inspections. Our UAVs take images and create visual 3D maps in DTM, DSM, Mosaic MAPS, 3D point cloud as image data outputs.

Seamlessly integrated to existing systems and create an efficient harmony between them. With the actionable intelligence, we collect from the field team, trains and signal coordination; our system creates a job, task management interfaces and works follow. Our UAVs can be triggered, for example, by meteorology data of lightning strikes, flies over the route and detects obstacles (fallen rocks, trees…etc.) and notify nearby field personnel or train on the route. Or in the event of an earthquake detects landslides, change in topography and notify nearby field personnel or train on the route. UAVs enable to record and transmit near-real-time footage both to engineers on the ground and to experts located elsewhere, making the whole process more efficient. We provide a full cycle situational awareness and response management with the actionable intelligence.

Today, we can analyze and filter data on our cloud-based, customized ‘Connected Ops’ (a Software as a Service that helps to manage all data processing between data sources on demand) and we save time on the field maintenance operations on railways.