Case Studies

Location-aware app tracks rail maintenance across a national network

The Challenge

Safe and accurate asset management tracking

The Australian Rail Track Corporation (ARTC) strive to improve safety, reliability and transit times, and capacity for the interstate freight and passenger rail markets.

Every year ARTC undertakes millions of dollars’ worth of rail maintenance across Australia, including track repairs and reconditioning. This work is critical to ensuring that the tracks are safe and reliable for the hundreds of trains using the network every day.

The Australian Rail Track Corporation consulted Lapis to produce a new and improved kilometrage application, KM2ME to support asset management and worker safety.

ARTC is responsible for managing a large proportion of Australia’s national interstate rail network. In fact, the government-owned corporation looks after more than 8500 route kilometres of interstate track across five states.

To understand where maintenance needs to occur, the ARTC uses a kilometre referencing system that relies on physical posts in the ground every kilometre that are uniquely numbered. The post locations are mapped and the numbers used to identify locations of assets on the rail network. One of the issues the ARTC faced was that these posts are not accurately spaced therefore making it a challenging task to precisely locate these posts.

To resolve this issue, Lapis were engaged to create an application that accurately displays post positions and allows users to easily locate their position on the tracks. The new app was to be designed to assist maintenance personnel in managing and undertaking works more effectively.

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The Approach

A powerful back-end database

Adopting agile methodologies, the Lapis team worked closely with the ARTC at every stage to build and adapt the solution to fit their requirements. In the process, the team underwent significant research and development to create a solution that would efficiently bring together the large quantities of data into a high-speed application.

The newly developed application for iOS consolidates vast amounts of data including updated reference data into a scalable, modern and user-friendly view that enables users to quickly and efficiently locate themselves in relation to the kilometrage posts mapped along the network. Information about tracks nearby including nearby kilometrage posts can be gained through the app, with GPS location updating every ten seconds for precise positioning.

“The team of developers at Lapis delivered a modern, functional and successful mobile app that has bridged the gap between the office and field staff increasing work efficiency.”

Matthew Brodie, GIS Specialist, Australia Rail Track Corporation

The app also allows users to capture and tag photos with location information including GPS references and kilometrage information, and measure the distance travelled. This information can then be sent back to the office via the app to assist with logging and determining future maintenance. Longitude and latitude coordinates can also be viewed and recorded for organisations such as emergency services to locate users.

The Results

Improved worker safety and streamlined workflows

The KM2ME application has received highly positive feedback from staff and contractors, as one safety advisor points out:

“Brilliant! The KM2ME app is so easy to use and allows our contracts to capture all necessary data, find meeting sites quickly and streamline the way we work.”

Key benefits of the application include the following:

Assists in promoting proactive maintenance logging
Accurate location identification facilitates immediate assistance
Promotes process efficiency and worker safety
Enables accurate spatial and GPS data references to be quickly generated
Customised solution with ongoing support providing scope for future updates and developments

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