Proactive Maintenance of Railway Switches

Railway switches operate in harsh environmental conditions; still, their reliability requirements are high due to safety and economic factors. Once deployed, their maintenance depends on the data collected on their status, and the decisions on due corrective actions. The more regular this data collection and decision cycle is, the better confidence their operator has on effective and proper service. Proactive maintenance, in general, targets exactly this: rather than scheduling maintenance actions based on operating hours or servicing volume, actions should be taken when it is really needed. This requires the effective combination of data collection, analysis, presentation and decision making processes. The MANTIS project proposes a reference architecture for proactive maintenance, supported by the concept of cyber-physical systems. Besides suggesting data collection, processing and presentation methods and tools for this, the results were applied in various domains-including production systems, the energy grid, utility vehicles, or railways. The current paper presents data collection, analysis and presentation concepts related to proactive maintenance, applied on railway switches.