Timothy Flower

Said the following about Network Rail and KONUX Network Delivery Team:

“There are mountains and lakes of data in the rail industry — collected every day and containing huge amounts of potential value. How to build the capability to leverage this data and provide benefits to maintainers, operators and ultimately rail users has remained a true challenge until now. To tackle this difficult task, we created a unique, cross-functional team to deliver network-wide benefits through the application of artificial techniques to existing but disparate and disconnected data sources.

This digital railway team was formed of project managers in Network Rail and KONUX, Network Rail sponsors, railway experts, data scientists and developers with excellent support from Worldline. The foundations of the team were set following discussions between KONUX, Doncaster Delivery Unit and the East Coast Route Data Capability team. Working together, the initial team collaborated with Network Rail’s Research and Development to create a proposal that was ultimately endorsed by the Track Asset Leadership Group. The aim of the project was to build and verify a solution to validate track categories for individual track segments and provide information on areas of over- or under-inspection, based on recorded train movements. This shows Engineers the potential for optimising resources in their areas based on the mismatch between actual and planned traffic.

The sponsor, Ian Dean, provided the overall direction to the team, including constructive feedback and support and acting as a key point of escalation to unblock many issues the team experienced. Without Ian’s can-do attitude the project would not have been able to deliver its significant outcomes within the agreed 7 month timescale.

The KONUX lead for the project was Petra Holeckova, ensuring the interfaces between the various companies were properly managed and dealing with the multitude of issues on an almost daily basis. Without Petra and Ian working together symbiotically the project would have overrun by many months and most likely would have failed. Petra’s tenacity and ability to fully understand and articulate what and why the various data sets were needed provided Ian with the ammunition he needed to escalate and ultimately resolve issues across a very complex set of stakeholders.

A special mention has to go to the exceptional help provided by John Manners from Network Rail’s Systems Support team in unblocking many of the data access issues.

Steven Babitch, Senior Product Manager, the KONUX development team led by Michael McCartney and user experience expert Judy Shaul worked in seamless collaboration with the nominated Network Rail technical expert, Josh Chambers, with Regional engineering oversight provided by Sin Sin Hsu. Together they created a product that not only met the agreed success criteria but which could also be easily integrated into the end user’s ways of working..

Throughout the entire project everyone involved exhibited an amazing team ethic, drawing up on each other’s skills, expertise and passion to overcome the following challenges:

Understanding and navigating the complexity of data ownership in NR and obtaining all the required inputs for the system

Overcoming time consuming and painful administrative hurdles to obtain the data despite having already obtained the necessary permissions.

Matching and confirming correlation between the disparate complex data sets, without which the project would have failed.

Delivering within an ambitious 7 months timeline, especially impressive when considering the above.

Paving the way for other companies who want to use network rail data, including development of a lessons-learned log that can be reused on future data capability projects.

The outcome has proven the value of utilising data for better monitoring, modelling and management of rail networks. This project has also set the foundations for future capabilities which will add significant value to the rail industry with proposals to build functionality for inspection planning, degradation modelling, speed restriction management and managing weather risk.“