In the framework of the international railway exhibition InnoTrans 2018 LocoTech Group of Companies and Clover Group announced the launch of SmartMaintenance (Digital Dispatching) to switch to managing repairs of rolling stock using artificial intelligence technologies.

“We plan to launch the solution in November 2018 at the Eastern proving ground, in particular, at the Vikhorevka service locomotive depot. Upon completion of the project, it will be possible to talk about specific economic indicators. We expect to implement the system by the end of January 2019,” said Alexey Belinsky, Chairman of the Board of LocoTech.

The SmartMaintenance is based on the data on the real and predicted technical condition of the equipment, obtained from the Smart Locomotive system. We’d like to remind that it was launched at LocoTech in 2016 and currently operates on 6,400 sections of locomotives in 40 service locomotive depots. The solution allows analysing 23 types of equipment of locomotives and finds more than 60 types of equipment malfunctions. The time for locomotive diagnostics in the system was reduced from 2 hours to 5 minutes.

SmartMaintenance automatically evaluates and predicts the technical condition of components and assemblies of the locomotive, offers the most optimal solution in terms of time and volume of service. This solution transforms the usual approaches to maintenance and repair (M&R), allowing the real-time process management as it is.

“The manager, in order to effectively manage the company, needs to see the technical condition of the entire fleet of equipment and rank it in terms of risk. As the equipment wears out, it requires proper management and repairs planning. SmartMaintenance solves these tasks automatically with the help of artificial intelligence - this is a logical continuation of the “Smart Locomotive” system, which transforms the usual repairs into a condition-based repair mode,” said Denis Kasimov, Director General of the Clover Group. 

During the implementation period, changes are planned in the business processes of the service company: integration with the existing IT architecture, updating job descriptions, and personnel training. SmartMaintenance will be integrated with the ERP system to automatically generate a repair plan for the fleet.