Maintenance and equipment: Colas Rail relies on IoT

Colas Rail, the railway subsidiary of the Colas group, and Objenious, a subsidiary of Bouygues Telecom dedicated to the internet of objects, announce a partnership to develop and implement an IoT solution for the digital transformation of Colas Rail’s businesses; A means of improving efficiency on the infrastructure part but also on the site management part.

The two partners therefore put in place a connected device which measures the clamping of the fishplate, a metal piece that connects two rails to each other. The sensor, developed by Vapé Rail International, installed at the level of the bolts of the fishplate, sends the clamping level daily to a central server which records this information. In this way, Colas Rail can plan its maintenance operations on the area.

Objenious also provides several levels of encryption that secure the information of these sensitive data. The innovation allows Colas Rail to propose a complete service offer to its customers. Today, the manufacture of these sensors passes into industrial phase. For the time being, 50 connected washers are tracked daily and upload information to establish trend curves that will predict the arrival of the phenomena and trigger the associated maintenance operations.

The second business application developed with Objenious aims at defining where the tools are, if they are used and in what state they are. Through the LoRa network, the sensor, whose design and connectivity are defined beforehand, hosts the data made available on a processing and visualization platform. Abeeway is the partner chosen by Colas Rail for the electronic part and Vapé Rail International is responsible for the plastics part.

This project, begun at the end of 2015, came to fruition on 19 September with the equipment of some thirty tools with pre-industrial beacons in a construction site truck. It will be launched in industrial phase next year. 10,000 site tools can potentially be equipped with these beacons.