RAMSYS drives best practices at Mumbai

Mumbai, INDIA - The contract "Technical Assistance in Improvement in Track Management and Maintenance System on Mumbai Suburban Section" between MERMEC and Mumbai Railway Vikas Corporation (MRVC) has foreseen, at the end of November 2008, an additional visit on a pilot section of the Central and Western Railways Network, technical meetings and seminars.

Prof. Coenraad Esveld (ECS, www.esveld.com) appointed by MERMEC as Senior Advisor has joined the RAMSYS Team at Mumbai to:

• Analyse the most critical anomalies of the area, in particular: drainage, rail corrosion, premature replacement of fasting, etc.
• Recommend a series of best practices applied by other railways around the world for similar criticalities and suggest potential solutions.

The Suburban Railway System in Mumbai is the most complex, densely loaded and intensively utilized system in the world.

The Mumbai Sub-urban Railway Network is spread over an expanse of 319 route kilometres; it includes very heavily utilised sections of Western Railway between Churchgate and Virar (61 Kms) and on central Railway between Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus and Kalyan (54 Kms) which have four line each (two fast lines and two slow lines on each section). Moreover, the line is characterised by the highest passenger density in the World - 6.3 million commuters travel everyday, a headway of 3 minutes and an annual tonnage of 50 MGT.

These operations, from the point of view of the annual tonnage make this urban railway network similar to a heavy haul one, though the total load of passenger trains is not comparable with the heavy haul ones. Anyhow, in such contexts, RAMSYS is even more a fundamental system to manage all the relevant data for the track maintenance and to support maintenance and renewal decisions.

In fact, more significant is the railway traffic and higher is the stress/deterioration of track components, more it needed an asset management and decision support system able to control and plan maintenance and renewal activities. RAMSYS achieved this goal by collecting in off line mode (using PDA, Rugged Laptops, etc. directly from the field) the relevant data and then using them for condition-based maintenance.

RAMSYS (Railway Asset Management SYStem) is a Decision Support System designed and developed by MERMEC to support the M&R activities planning. RAMSYS platform ensures a holistic approach to maintenance management adopting sophisticated visualization, deterioration-modelling and whole-life asset management principles that were designed to satisfy exactly railway infrastructure maintenance management requirements.