Belgian rail-freight company Lineas is tracking its fleet of railcars (which it calls wagons) with a wireless sensor-based system that captures data regarding each car's location via wireless sensor tags and gateways. With Internet of Thing (IoT) technology provided by Bosch, the company says it is able to increase its efficiency and sustainability by identifying bottlenecks, properly routing wagons to maintenance and identifying any under-utilized cars.
The tagging of railcars with 2G cellular, narrowband IoT (NB-IoT) and LTE-M-based gateways is now under way, the company reports, and by the end of the year, it expects to have tagged 2,600 of its 7,000 railcars. To date, Lineas says the technology has improved the utilization of its fleet by more than 40 percent. Headquartered in Brussels, Lineas is Europe's largest private rail-freight operator, serving Western Europe with trains and wagons that transport steel, chemicals, automotive products and other freight.
The company is employing the cloud-based Track and Trace software, as well as IoT sensors and gateways that are attached to railcars and along tracks or at rail stations. Monitoring the movements of thousands of railcars that move across national borders throughout Europe is highly challenging, according to Suzy Verachten, Lineas's project leader for asset management. This is typically accomplished by manually viewing, inputting and comparing information from several different IT systems, as well as from phone calls and e-mails.
Although data collection may be arduous, Verachten says, it is also critical since Lineas manages its own assets and also shares estimated-time-of-arrival (ETA) data with its customers—the owners of the freight being transported in each railcar. A lack of visibility, she says, meant that wagons were not being used to their full potential. That required the addition of more railcars to the fleet, some of which were not being used.
When Lineas met with Bosch, its primary goal was to optimize the fleet of cars that it managed manually. "That means doing more business with fewer wagons," Verachten explains. "We checked where wagons are standing still too long," for instance, as well as how the wagons' flow through maintenance processes could be made more efficient. The company also wanted a view into when customers may have railcars parked at their own sites that need to be returned for use.
In addition, Verachten says, the company sought to improve the customer experience. "For sure, we already have steps taken," she states, "but there is still a lot of potential." While the company shares ETAs and other information with customers, Lineas wanted its freight status updates to be more accurate and in real time, while also offering historical data for analytics purposes. Automatically capturing railcar location and status data, then sharing that information with customers, she says, enables those customers to view data indicating where they might improve efficiency.
Source: https://www.rfidjournal.com/iot-boosts-railcar-utilization-for-european-freight-forwarder