SURVEYING & GEOTECHNICAL ENGINEERING

Maintaining overhead line equipment (OLE) that carries electricity at 25,000 volts to power electric trains is highly challenging for Network Rail’s works delivery teams. When inspecting live overhead wires, its engineers are required to climb poles to get up close for asset audit inspections. This potentially dangerous procedure has been overhauled thanks to a ‘connected worker’ trial that combined drones and digital workflows to ensure worker safety, reduced equipment failure and costs.

In 2021 visual intelligence provider Cyberhawk partnered with workflow automation specialists Intoware to provide a powerful integrated solution, that combines drone imagery, visual platforms with smart digital workflows to help address this challenge.

Cyberhawk and Intoware demonstrated that by combining robotics (Drones), wearables (HMT) and digital workflows into one ‘single source of truth’ (iHawk), Network Rail could drastically reduce business risk and outages, keeping the service running.

With drones rail engineers are able to collect highly detailed visual data without exposing themselves to harm. By performing these tasks for engineers, it makes routine inspections safer, quicker, easier and cheaper as the lines don’t need to be closed and most importantly, it reduces the need to work at height and manpower on site, or ‘boots off ballast’.

But despite these benefits, its works delivery team relied on paper-based and legacy systems for asset audit inspections, often leading to delays as reports would be completed manually and then written up days later.

It was agreed therefore, that a new digital ‘connected worker’ solution was needed for its engineers to combine aerial imagery with ground level inspection data made accessible in a central data repository for better, faster and more accurate ‘real-time’ asset reporting for its works delivery teams.

Having seen WorkfloPlus gain a 70 per cent productivity improvement for rail track renewals from a trial at its Aston Depot, Network Rail’s Electrification and Plant Engineer, Sean Hill, was keen to adopt this smart workflow technology as part of a new ‘proof-of-concept’ trial beginning in July 2021 on the East Coast Mainline at Belford, near Newcastle.

With Intoware’s support, Network Rail’s Belford team digitised a series of legacy, paper-based inspection processes. This meant working with frontline staff on the ground to fully understand their activities, assess issues and challenges and design, digitise and standardise workflows to meet existing needs and make time, safety and sustainability benefits.

This innovatory four-month trial combined Cyberhawk’s iHawk visual intelligence solution iHawk integrated with smart workflows created in WorkfloPlus to support frontline inspection teams.

This is how it works – WorkfloPlus draws on iHawk’s cloud-based visual data in one easy-to-use workflow process that allows on-site engineers to follow step-by-step digital work instructions on their tablets to complete maintenance tasks instead of relying on paper-based processes on site. iHawk’s map driven interface is integrated with WorkfloPlus to provide engineers with access to highly detailed 360-degree images of the overhead wires or equipment and accompanying trend data from previous audits. This new integrated solution enables one location to flag up any warnings or anomalies and provides a record of who was responsible for each inspection, giving on-site engineers a clear audit and visibility of works overtime to support better decision making as close to ‘real-time’ as possible.

As WorkfloPlus provides standardised and consistent workflows, it meant that its rail engineers knew exactly what data needed to be collected, as they were guided through a process so they knew what to check, what photographic evidence was needed and what to report. This meant that the data was always ‘right first time’, significantly reducing the need to take further reassessments on site due to incomplete data.

Intoware’s Business Development Director, Hannah Bailey said: ‘We’re really pleased to have partnered with Network Rail for this innovative asset audit trial. By bringing these two powerful technologies together we have enabled its maintenance teams to realise the potential of aerial data integrated with smart digital workflows, to deliver greater speed, accuracy and visibility of rail assets, shortening the time it takes to get results.’

Thanks to the success of Belford’s ‘proofof-concept’ trial, discussions are currently underway within Network Rail to deploy this best-practice and consistent approach across it works management teams for the entire East Coast mainline for improved worker safety, efficiency and ultimately, less disruption to rail services.

Hannah Bailey, Business Development Director, Intoware