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After a one-year trial, the Utah Transportation Administration (UTA), a bus and rail service provider in the Salt Lake City area, officially deployedRFIDThe solution is to record the entry and exit of the light rail train into the maintenance area and track the 22 components on each car. The system allows the transportation department to better manage trains, train maintenance and various components.
UTA serves a population of 2.2 million in Salt Lake City and has 700 buses, 146 light rail trains, and 60 commuter trains. In the past six months, the project has piloted 4 trains in its maintenance yard. The department is currently expanding the scope of the system and using RFID technology to track all 146 trains and their components. UTA’s long-term plan is to use this technology to track all commuter cars, buses and their components.
In 2012, federal legislation passed the 21st Century Act (MAP21). The final ruling requires the bus company to conduct periodic assessments of assets including passenger vehicles. In response to this legislation, UTA needs to establish a plan to assess the condition of trains and buses to ensure their safety and efficient operation.
Kyle Stockley, UTA Asset Manager, said: “UTA wants to do more. We want to automate the tracking of major components and systems. UTA found that tracking vehicles alone is far from meeting the requirements of the bill.”
UTA hopes that they can not only understand the condition of the vehicle itself, they also want to understand the condition of the main systems and components. Stockley said: “Only in this way can we truly understand the condition of our revenue service vehicles.” Monitoring the time and frequency of use of the vehicle and its components is the best way to track the condition of the vehicle.
The agency believes that RFID is the best technology to achieve this goal. After attaching the RFID tag to the main component and deploying the reader on the railway, UTA can collect the data of the component entering and leaving the yard to calculate its usage time.
UTA’s pilot project is located at the Jordan River Service Center and involves the Siemens S70 light rail train. In this pilot project, UTA installed tags on a total of 4 trains and 22 individual components, and installed 2 RFID readers on both sides of the railway track, each with 8 antennas.
UTA’s RFID deployment is the result of a team’s joint efforts. The organization has established a committee that includes asset management personnel, procurement department, operations department, maintenance department and IT department personnel. Through a tender, the Seattle company Swiftsure Group and its partner American RFID Solutions (ARS) were finally selected.
Swiftsure Group and American RFID carefully studied UTA’s software requirements, reader requirements, placement location, tag requirements and installation location. Bruno Riegl, CEO of Swiftsure, said that ARS provided TrackStar software, which runs on a server on site.
UTA installed an RFID reader at the entrance and exit of the railway maintenance depot. The reader uses Motorola FX9500 reader and 8 ARS HD500 antennas: 4 are installed above the signal bar to read the tags above the vehicle, 2 are installed on the ground of the signal pole, and the other two are installed on the track. It is used to read the tag on the bottom of the train. At the entrance and exit, the train can reach speeds of 15 miles per hour.
Stockley said that the company chose to use the Omni-ID Dura 1500 passive UHF tag, which has good durability and read reliability in metal environments. Since there are no welds or bolts on the tags, they are installed with epoxy.
After marking each component, the TrackStar software will record the serial number, reading history and its corresponding unique ID number. ARS sales director John Rommel said that the software also stores the parent-child relationship between the label and its components, and provides reports in 5 file formats (PDF, xvs, excel, etc.). In addition, the software also provides a custom control panel and a custom search function.
This morning, the one-year pilot project ended. During this period, the agency tracked the movement of marked assets and compared this data with train mileage. Stockley said the purpose of this pilot is to confirm whether the tags can be read and whether the software can collect data. The next step of deployment will be to analyze these data, understand the usage history of the components, and arrange daily maintenance and inspections.
So far, UTA has marked 38 light rail trains and their components. Stockley said: “We will mark all 77 trains by the end of this year. We expect that by the end of 2015, UTA will have a total of 2500 items to be marked.”
At the end of this year, UTA also intends to distribute handheld readers to employees for maintenance or inspections, so that they can update data while working. In the future, UTA intends to install wireless sensors to measure temperature, pressure and vibration level data to identify changes in vehicle status.
(Exclusive manuscript of rfid world network, please indicate the source author for reprinting!)
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