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What do railroad and industrial automation have in common?
Actually quite a bit. If you think about it a railroad is actually a factory. One great
big long factory! The functions of a railroad, namely the transport of cars full of
goods and people, is little different from that of other process industries in terms
of defined process steps, rules regarding operations and the repeated automation
of system responses to changing conditions. Both railroads and factory
automation systems have the primary economic goal of safely utilizing their fixed
assets (machines, mixers, conveyors for manufacturers; locomotives, cars, and
track for railroads) to their maximum capabilities in order to maximize production
(whether number of widgets or ton-miles per operating dollar). In other words
efficiency, efficiency, efficiency.
in the world
producing a car
every 30 seconds,
24 hours a day, 7
days a week, 365
days a year
The answer is - extensively! Simply considering the logistical challenge railroads
have in maintaining a "production line" distributed over thousands of miles of
geographical territory it is clear that any simple comparison of manufacturing and
processing automation to that of a railroad is overly simplistic, never mind the
differences in the types of equipment they are controlling.
Railroad automation differs from factories in some other important ways as well.
The most important of these are the areas of safety and environment. Although
certain factory automation tasks have safety requirements at least as high as the
safety requirements of railroads (imagine automating a process involving bulk
quantities of hazardous chemicals or perhaps nuclear materials) the vast majority
of factories operate under less stringent mandates than railroads which have the
potential for death and catastrophic circumstances in almost every daily
operation they perform.
In contrast to factories railroads also tend to be outside! In terms of automation
equipment this results in some very specific requirements which generally do not
exist in factories. As we will see, however, some factory automation
environments can actually have conditions equal to or even exceeding the
severity required by railroads (think of a the heat of a steel processing plant or
the corrosiveness of chemical manufacturing).
Railroad automation and factory automation also tend to be different in terms of
functionality, applicable norms and standards, and the measurement of fixed
asset performance as a contributing factor to overall efficiency - one area where
railroads could learn quite a bit from the automation industry.
achieve this
productivity?
different from other automation industries as it may think. Some of the primary
challenges facing railroads in the automation of asset operations (for example,
interlockings and grade crossing controllers) parallel similar challenges facing
other industries that are operating on a much larger scale in terms of number
and frequency of processing cycle and controlled equipment ( the PLC market
is a $5 billion/year market). By understanding how these
companies are responding to their challenges, railroads can better formulate
their own strategies for migrating towards higher efficiency. Given the
projected increase in railroad traffic over the next 20 years of up to 70% and
the resulting efficiency demand on assets, such strategies are sure to gain in
importance for railroads.
Given the fact that railroads tend to be a highly specialized and therefore
somewhat isolated industry it is also important for railroads to stay up to date
on the technical advances in the automation world. Although historically a
pioneer in the practical use of many new technologies (telegraph, telephone,
radio communiciations) the railroad industry has fallen behind in several keyareas
in recent years as economic pressure on the manufacturing and processing
industries (often in the form of relocation to lower wage countries-not exactly
feasible with a railroad!) has driven technological innovations at an
ever-increasing rate. It is beneficial for railroaderss to stay informed regarding
these advances as we can then better judge the modernity of our own
equipment and suppliers as well as to help shape the direction of technological
advances in our own industry.
learn from them?
Measurement
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