Following the unprecedented recent decline in global passenger numbers due to the pandemic, the Rolling Stock industry is finally back on track. The global Rolling Stock market size was estimated to be worth US$49.26 billion in 2022 and is predicted to reach US$68.71 billion by 2023, growing at a CAGR of 4.40% for the period spanning 2018-2023.
This substantial growth, however, has its challenges with the knock-on effect of staff shortages due to the pandemic and a push for a more mindful approach to a safe, healthy and environmentally-conscious future.
Climate change is one of the greatest challenges faced by the world today, alongside the current global pandemic. 2022 saw the true impact on the local and global environments regarding climate change, with Government organisations undertaking ambitious efforts to combat climate change and drive clean economic growth, putting pressure on businesses to follow suit and strive for net zero targets in greenhouse emissions. Since 1990 transport emissions have been rising every year in Australia, with transport being responsible for 18% of Australia’s greenhouse gas emissions in 2020.
Looking to the future, sustainability and a decarbonisation plan is imperative in the rail industry that transports half of Australia’s freight. As we look to a sustainable future centred around electrification and automation, 2023 could be the year that promises to deliver change, innovation and alternative modes of traction from the archaic methods by championing the next steps for the Australian rail industry.
Australia is at the forefront of world-leading business, science, technology, innovative thinkers and economic opportunities and at the vanguard of economic change by creating better places to live, work and travel in.
Going forward, from years of a global disaster in supply and demand for trade, we now understand the importance of creating an efficient, convenient and cost-effective sustainable delivery system joining a localised supply of individuals, businesses, local authorities, trade associates, researchers and innovators working together to decisively tackle transport emissions and keep the economy on its feet.
The past 2 years have shown the risk to cost and turnaround time when dependent on overseas solutions and OEMs. Developing a local Australian supply chain is more critical than ever. Delivering higher-quality service at a lower cost and in reduced time has been a core objective for Trovon. Our in-housed services and localised supply chain has allowed us to reduce costs by an average of 20-30% than the current OEM offering with an average 10-to-14-day turnaround. Providing a cost-effective, high-quality and safety-assured alternative”
Success will require the Australian transport sector and its users to step up and meet the challenges and embrace new technological advances and innovation like never before, including new mobility innovation within the re-engineering process, changing the way vehicles, equipment and components are used, replaced and the way fleets operate, maintain, and manage their Rolling Stock.
This push for innovation and automation to lessen and remove the impact of transport on the environment internally allows the Australian rail and aviation industry to demonstrate real leadership domestically and globally, setting us on a credible tangible path to creating change in sectors that require global solutions.
The real change for our economy is to use automation not to replace jobs but to place automated machine learning applications with people and organisations to scale and automate the process of testing, building, deploying and maintaining models for a dataset through condition-based monitoring. So what is the next step?
Condition-based monitoring is nothing new for the rail industry, but we saw a gap in the market. And the gap in the market was doing more than just collecting data. “
The past
Let’s face it; the current maintenance paradigm is broken. Scheduled maintenance is costly and inefficient, and these costs are no longer sustainable in large operations. However, failures can be devastating to the bottom line.”
The current condition monitoring solutions have many technological limitations using open-source algorithms, manual data cleansing, and trial and error pipe generation to provide threshold alerts which often result in post-failure notifications or false positives. The current market condition-based monitoring uses machine learning with significant human intervention to interpret data and attempt to predict component failure to generate disparate and disconnected data.
The problem? These systems do not facilitate automated or predictive insights.
Data in itself from sensors is not enough to be able to identify problems in advance. We needed predictive analytics. We scanned the global market for potential partners that would allow us to interpret the sensor data to identify the risk of potential failure.”
In order to produce results in a rail context, an AI application would need to ingest both structured and unstructured data, understand the technical and systemic relevance of that data, and continuously adjust and correct for multiple causal factors.
The solution? Trovon’s Predictive Maintenance Platform – SYVX (pronounced sigh-vicks) powered by SparkCognition is revolutionising maintenance by minimising downtime and delivering millions of dollars in operating cost savings by aggregating all forms of data, automating inspections, and telling you what is going to happen and when, and what you need to do to fix it.
The future of Rolling Stock maintenance has arrived
Trovon’s unique re-engineering processes are the future of Rolling Stock maintenance. SYVX significantly reduces both the expense and waste involved in unnecessarily replacing parts or products, which in turn leads to a measurable reduction in costs, inventory, labour, and input energy and emissions required to produce replacement equipment, components, or parts. The resultant outcome is a Win/Win for both your bottom line and the environment.”
The now
Trovon’s AI solution analyses, optimises & learns from data to augment human intelligence in predicting future asset maintenance requirements & the optimisation and automation of processes & workflows.
What this means for the market (Market context):
SYVX platform redefines how AI extends the life of critical rail assets. As a result, the rail industry growth will be driven by asset lifecycle optimising technologies using real-time data analysis to facilitate automated, predictive, condition-based maintenance.
Its pioneering proprietary machine learning and predictive analytics algorithms cross-reference data between and across fleets to return actionable insights, flagging suboptimal operations and identifying impending failures before they occur.
Trovon and SparkCognition partner to develop SYVX
SYVX automatically ingests structured, unstructured and contextual data and applies the integrated IP of SparkCognitions (AI) and Trovon (engineering) to predict failures, identify root causes, deliver actions and optimise resources.”
The Trovon Group was born as a result of the private equity-backed management buyout of Sabre Rail Australia from Sabre Rail Services UK. Trovon’s strong multi-disciplinary engineering capabilities have provided OEM-grade MRO services for critical sub-systems to the A/NZ rolling stock industry since 2015. The business has expanded component coverage from brakes to HVAC and doors for major projects relating to the likes of Sydney Trains, Yarra Trams, Alstom and Greater Wellington Rail.
In April 2021, the management team formed Trovon and acquired the business of Sabre Rail Australia Pty Ltd. Trovon (Australia) Pty Ltd is 100% owned by Trovon Group Pty Ltd, which is capitalised by Alceon Group. Established in 2010, Alceon has invested over $3.8 billion across real estate, private equity, and listed equity. It has A$1.8 billion of funds under management.
Trovon Group’s Mission is to provide our global customer base with the very best in Innovation, Design, Materials and Operational & Environmental analysis tools to maximise the Lifetime Extension of your most valuable assets – your rolling stock.”
SparkCognition Government Systems (SGS) is a wholly-owned subsidiary that leverages proven commercial technologies to meet the needs of the most pressing public-sector problems. SparkCognition mission is to deliver world-class AI solutions to predict future outcomes, optimise processes, and ensure worker safety.
The partnership of Trovon Group and SparkCognition was a perfect match of engineers, scientists and innovators with the sole purpose of driving change and empowering individuals, organisations and fleets to run a more sustainable, safer, and profitable business. Essential for rail infrastructure.”
What Sparkcognition brings to the table for the SYVX platform is a ‘set and forget’ approach. The SYVX platform allows businesses to onboard very quickly without having a full-blown team of data scientists. Incorporating patented AI technology, SYVX will enable organisations to centralise disparate data sources and optimise the maintenance of rail assets based on advanced Ai algorithms, Automated Machine Learning, and Deep Natural Language processing.
Trovon’s next-generation dynamic neural AI solution, SYVX, powered by SparkCognition, embraces engineering expertise and data analytics to optimise, autonomously monitor and automate maintenance programs, enhancing asset performance.
SYVX doesn’t just help you predict when your assets are trending to failure. It also provides prescriptive insights that help you understand the underlying reason for the problem and determine which corrective actions you should take to resolve it most efficiently. SYVX analyses, optimises and learns from structured and unstructured data sources to deliver predictive maintenance of rail assets by integrating with customer systems.
SYVX is unlike any other AI platform currently on the market for conditional-based maintenance and OEM agnostic capture that delivers real efficiencies for rail maintenance operations.
Our unique approach can significantly reduce both the cost and waste involved in producing new parts or products, which in turn leads to a measurable reduction in input energy and emissions required to produce replacement equipment. We expect to see a reduction of 30% of scheduled maintenance costs as a result of the use of the platform.”
Conditional Based Maintenance
The OEM agnostic capture and analysis of holistic maintenance and environmental data. This facilitates predictive maintenance and lifecycle optimisation for asset owners and operators. Integrating SparkCognition’s AI solution with Trovon’s high-engineering processes allows SYVX to provide the following benefits:
Mitigation of asset failure & network service disruption
- cost
- inconvenience
- safety
Life cycle cost reduction
- optimal maintenance regime
- longer service intervals
- reduced consumption of components, consumables & labour
Production efficiency
- just-in-time batch procurement/volume breaks
- logistics efficiency
- optimal inventory/supply chain management.
Asset life extension
- capital expenditure deferral
- residual value preservation
SYVX is a self-teaching neural AI engine that delivers sophisticated algorithms that exceed the predictive capabilities of traditional AI, resulting in reduced false alarms of archaic structures. As a result, the automated model-building gets faster results, shrinking processes from days or weeks to hours and adapting to different assets & processes to generate accurate predictions (including root cause). In addition, the continuous/adaptive algorithms capture subject matter expert knowledge to deliver best practices requiring limited human engagement during deployment that enables quick scale-up to large-scale deployments.
SYVX use natural language algorithms to ingest, analyse & provide relevant unstructured data to monitor the performance of the components on a train, predict potential failures and optimise the maintenance of those components.
DeepNLP by SparkCognition
Level Up Your Business Operations with Natural Language Processing
DeepNLP uses AI models and natural language processing and analysis to make sense of unstructured data and content found in manuals, books and texts.
The beauty of DeepNLP is that it puts content into context, allowing real-time automated decision-making. This enables predictive insights unlocking data’s hidden value, streamlining operations, augmenting human abilities and driving profitability.”
Trovon Group Pty Ltd.
Darwin by SparkCognition
Darwin is an automated machine learning solution allowing users to deploy AI models at scale. Taking a no-code approach, anyone can quickly develop, deploy, and optimise models.
By operationalising data, Darwin accelerates time to market, eliminating waste and facilitating new revenue streams for organisations allowing them to scale and achieve fast, tangible results that impact your bottom line.”
Trovon Group Pty Ltd.
Darwin enables data and business analysts, SMEs and other teams within the operations to prepare from scratch datasets and custom-build models faster than ever before.
Adopting data science across teams and operations drives higher efficiencies and allows businesses to discover new revenue opportunities and become data-driven enterprises.”
Trovon Group Pty Ltd.
Darwin uses core patented technology and data science that preserves the accuracy and performance of automated model-build processes in data at scale with no code development, automated machine learning and model optimisation. It provides an intuitive environment taking users quickly from data to meaningful results.
Darwin leverages available data to provide actionable insights, catching issues before they occur, preventing unplanned downtime, mitigating costs, improving safe operations and driving bottom-line results.”
Trovon Group Pty Ltd.
Darwin maximises fleet uptime, performs critical tasks and analyse risks whilst allowing to review of detailed historical data highlighting problems within the dataset and offering solutions and creating new scenarios for any errors encountered.
A Deeper Look at the Science Behind Darwin
Using its enhanced ability to capture complex relationships and intricacies within the detailed historical data using state-of-the-art genetic time series, long short-term memory (LSTM) and temporal conventional network (TCN) architectures, its neuro-evolutionary engine to quickly evaluate and forecast algorithms and creates solutions for complex data to predict multiple time horizons.
Darwin has dozens of features to clean and enrich your dataset using neuro-evolution, making it usable for algorithmic development.
The Darwin Difference:
Darwin uses a blend of deep learning, evolutionary methods, auto-tuning of neural architectures, and automated model-building processes to effectively create an optimal model, unparalleled accuracy and unique solution based on the intricacies of your data to generate predictions tailored to your data problems. Furthermore, it captures complex relationships over time and exploits them to make more accurate predictions using complex temporal relationships in LSTM and TCN architectures.
Darwin and its architectures are ever-evolving to maintain scalability, complexity and efficiency. Darwin remains unmatched by model-building products on the market for the speed and accuracy it delivers. “
Trovon Group Pty Ltd.
Learn more about Darwin 2.0 at www.sparkcognition.com/product/Darwin
Digitalisation: Using the SYVX platform for the future of the rail industry.
Trovon’s AI solution SYVX analyses, optimises & learns from data to augment human intelligence in predicting future asset maintenance requirements & optimising and automating processes & workflows.
The SYVX platform uses subject matter expertise to interpret data to build and teach models. The neural self-teaching AI capabilities ingest data, determine relevance & priority, predict events and optimise actions. The contextual data (e.g. weather, locational) is ingested & analysed to produce more in-depth, relevant & accurate insights. The platform uses insights, inputs and processes to detect safety & procedure breaches, optimise programs & supply chains, generate work orders, instructions & documentation and automate functions.
The SYVX platform interprets the unstructured data (e.g. technical standards, manuals, work orders, and other written or digital records/files) and then converts this into structured data for analysis. The structured data is then gathered by sensors and streamed in real-time for analysis relative to historical & comparable peer data.
The Future
Trovon: Towards a profitable and sustainable future
With the PE backing, we are expanding to new geographical locations, & introducing our asset life extension services.”
Trovon Group Pty Ltd.
Soon, we will be launching automated inspections and then transcribe that to tracks, wires, and signals. We can go more into more operational efficiencies for our customers and ourselves. Passenger experience: I think the possibilities are limitless. “
Trovon Group Pty Ltd.
Sustainability engineering
At Trovon, we understand that equipment must operate efficiently and reliably to ensure that operational service availability remains at the high levels demanded by asset operators. We also acknowledge that as equipment ages, its reliability diminishes, but this does not need to be the case!”
Trovon Group Pty Ltd.
We deliver solutions to reliably extend the life of critical systems through a process of Product Improvement that heavily integrates root cause analysis techniques with design, materials, operational and environmental analysis. This results in the Life Extension of customer assets, thereby reducing the waste involved in the manufacture of new products.”
Trovon Group Pty Ltd.
Trovon’s Global Footprint
We supply and maintain critical rolling stock sub-systems by employing proprietary engineering processes and AI that extends service intervals and component life while offering a faster, lower-cost and localised alternative for operators.”
Trovon Group Pty Ltd.
Trovon’s capabilities are now available to various countries throughout MENA, SEA, CEE & LATAM regions. In addition, we are increasing coverage of components and customers by establishing local service facilities in key regions. Trovon operates in Sydney, Melbourne, and Dubai and has representation in Argentina, Malaysia, Poland, Egypt and Turkey.
We have a strong commitment to sustainable development and the environment. Our approach reduces the input energy and emissions required to produce replacement equipment, reduces waste generated by the disposal of the existing equipment, and extends the life of the components, which enhances the customer’s asset value.”
Trovon Group Pty Ltd.
Trovon: the future
Who is Trovon?
Founded as Sabre Rail Australia Pty Ltd in 2015, the business has expanded component coverage from brakes to HVAC and doors for major projects relating to the likes of Sydney Trains, Yarra Trams, Alstom and Greater Wellington Rail.
Trovon group are leading independent asset remediation specialist and rolling stock sub-system maintainers with a wealth of experience in mainline, high-speed, freight, metro and light rail asset management and MRO services. Trovon’s asset optimisation specialists take customer service and development innovation to another level striving for excellence in repairing, rebuilding and remanufacturing complex safety-critical equipment. Established as Sabre Rail Australia in 2015, Trovon’s engineering, maintenance, and supply chain capabilities (developed in Australia) are now available in various countries throughout the #MENA, #SEA, #CEE & #LATAM regions. Trovon is supported by a blue-chip customer base, many of which are long-standing customers of the business providing recurring project work or ongoing multi-year contract terms.
Learn more about Trovon Group and SYVX.
Contact us today for a confidential discussion. info@trovongroup.com. Our highly skilled Team is always eager to discuss any complex issue you may have when it comes to keeping your rolling stock well-maintained and moving. We believe engineering excellence is no longer enough in the modern rail sector, so we’re taking customer service and development innovation to another level.
At Trovon, we understand that equipment must operate efficiently and reliably to ensure that operational service availability remains at the high levels demanded by asset operators. We offer a wealth of experience in mainline, high-speed, freight, metro and light rail component maintenance services.
We deliver:
– Cost-effective, high quality, safety assured, short lead time offering
– Advanced engineering and AI-driven approach to asset life optimisation
– Proprietary supply chain of bespoke and parallel parts
– Localised services delivered by transportable work cells & qualified partners
– Inhouse engineering & manufacturing capabilities.