Use our innovative IT systems to get the most value from your assets
Industry is built upon critical assets: systems that are vital to the smooth and safe operation of business. These assets might be processing equipment, servers, railway track, or pipelines, but they all share a common problem: how can they be kept operational for as long as possible, and as economically as possible, without sacrificing reliability or safety?
The answer, of course, is appropriate maintenance. If this task is neglected, assets are likely to deteriorate, leading to unscheduled downtime and lost production or, more seriously, catastrophic failure that impacts on health, environment and safety. When schedules are tight, the effects of these asset failures can cascade well beyond any individual system. However, an overly rigorous maintenance plan can be just as damaging to profits, with financial and temporal overheads of unnecessary maintenance and downtime quickly mounting up.
These problems can be mitigated by taking a systematic approach to active management of assets. The first requirement is accurate and up to date information about the assets. From this, predictions can then be made and acted on. This may involve designing systems to automatically sense changes in condition and dynamically update maintenance schedules in response. Such online, real-time monitoring systems can result in drastically reduced lifecycle costs, while still ensuring that production and services are reliable and efficient.
Examples of our Asset Condition Management applications include:
TAPAS (the “Train Automatic Performance Analysis System”) our award-winning system which uses “On-Train Monitoring and Recording” (OTMR) device collected data to monitor fleet performance and identify maintenance requirements.
SwitchView- Tessella have worked closely with Balfour Beatty Rail Technologies (BBRT) to develop a sophisticated remote condition monitoring system capable of real time trend analysis on performance data.
WLCM (Whole Life Cost Model) – as part of research sponsored by the UK Highways Agency, Tessella and TRL created the WLCM to determine the best maintenance strategy for sections of the UK trunk road network over its lifetime. This predicts when treatments would be required and then analysis the relative merits of various scenarios, such as delaying the work to avoid immediate costs or choosing cheaper treatments. The model also predicts the effect of this maintenance on road users.
For more background, see our Technical Supplement on Asset Management and Monitoring.
