Monitoring rail switches with ASSET Rail and UbiOps

ASSET Rail is the fastest-growing rail maintenance contractor in the Netherlands.

ASSET Rail is responsible for maintaining the rail network infrastructure and assets in an increasing number of contract areas (“PGO gebieden”). ASSET Rail has managed to enter and gain a strong position in the conservative Dutch rail maintenance market in a short time.

They achieved that using their innovative approach; relying on specialist knowledge of rail technologies, but also by making use of the vast amounts of data collected of switches, tracks, catenaries and other rail assets.

ASSET Rail needs to link data connectors, processing steps and models and exposing them as a single endpoint to visualize in a dashboard.

Asset managers, data scientists and DevOps engineers of ASSET Rail are using UbiOps to deploy and manage these switch condition monitoring pipelines. They made use of the powerful pipeline functionality in UbiOps, by linking their models, algorithms and data connectors, and exposing them as a single endpoint. Making model requests when new sensor data is available is extremely easy.

ASSET Rail needs to link data connectors, processing steps and models and exposing them as a single endpoint to visualize in a dashboard.

Fast deployment of algorithms.

As the AI models are continuously being retrained and improved, ASSET Rail benefits from the model versioning feature of UbiOps. New models are easily uploaded and fitted in the existing pipeline, without the need to change the way the pipeline is called. Where setting up a model hosting environment and deployment of models previously took months of time and effort, with UbiOps this process was reduced to hours. Every day models, connectors and pipelines deployed in UbiOps process time series data of over 30.000 flips of 500+ switches. And ready for more!

We can quickly conduct pilots, and if successful, deploy it in production. We use UbiOps for different types of scripts: data cleaning/reshaping, several regression models and one neural network.

Mart Folkerts

Head asset management at ASSET Rail

What I mostly appreciate are the fast response time and user-friendly UI. Have a new database, schema or storage platform? Just add a connector to the pipelines.

We also appreciate the notification system when models or data sources misbehave. That makes it easier to detect issues quickly in production.

UbiOps allows ASSET rail to successfully score the health of railway switches in the Netherlands, on a daily basis, with minimum CAPEX and low overhead costs for developers, using UbiOps. Ubiops CLI and template documentation allow for an quick implementation of CI/CD with existing online git repositories.

Enrique Gutierrez

Data scientist at ASSET Rail

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