SMRT Trains and Bentley Systems Partnering to Improve Rail Safety

The reliability of Singapore’s mass rapid transit (MRT) network has continued to improve in the last few years. In June 2020, the MRT network clocked 1.6 million train km between delays, which puts Singapore’s train network among the best performers globally. The Land Transport Authority and public transport operators play a major role in the improvement in rail reliability.

Recently, Bentley Systems and Strides Engineering, a business arm of SMRT Corporation, announced the signing of a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU). They will jointly market a rail predictive maintenance solution in the Asia Pacific region. The predictive maintenance system will improve the rail reliability further. Let’s check out more about it below.

Bentley Systems is an infrastructure engineering software company that provides industry-leading software solutions for the design, construction, and operations of roads and bridges, rail and transit, water and wastewater, mining, industrial facilities, and more.

SMRT Trains, the Mass Rapid Transit (MRT) operator in Singapore, and Bentley Systems have successfully completed the implementation of a Predictive Decision Support System (PDSS). The PDSS system is based on Bentley’s AssetWise Linear Analytics. It has proved to improve the reliability of the 282 kilometers long North-South and East-West (NSEWL) Lines. SMRT will start implementing the PDSS solution on the Circle Line (CCL) in Singapore. After the successful implementation in the NSEWL line, SMRT and Bentley will work together to market the PDSS solution.

Under the terms of the MOU, both organizations will market the PDSS solution to urban rail and metro operators in the Asia Pacific region. The predictive maintenance solution will help operators to visualise all rail asset information and monitor and analyse rail conditions.

Lam Sheau Kai, president of SMRT Trains, said, “Leveraging technology and taking pre-emptive actions are two very important components in the plan to help us improve and maintain rail reliability for the train lines SMRT Trains operates. PDSS represents both components, and its successful implementation for the North-South and East-West lines has given us much confidence to scale it for the rest of our lines.”

Condition monitoring is a key predictive maintenance capability deployed to collect and analyse operating data for potential rail failure identification. The PDSS solution offers enhanced diagnostics capability that contributes to the overall train-service reliability for commuters. Commenting on SMRT’s contribution in improving rail reliability, SMRT Chairman, Seah Moon Ming, said, “We have kept another year of rail reliability with a mean kilometres between failure (MKBF) of 1 million train-km. Our strong performance for the Public Transport Customer Satisfaction Survey and the Singapore Tourism Board’s Customer Service Excellence Awards (Transport) encourages and inspires us to continually find new ways to delight and move commuters.”

Conclusion
Technology and taking pre-emptive actions are essential in improving and maintaining rail reliability. Strides Engineering’s (SMRT’s business arm) collaboration with Bentley Systems on the PDSS demonstrates their strong domain and rail operational capabilities. This partnership will also help other rail operators to utilize the PDSS solution and enhance rail reliability.