Improving availability and utility of shared rail remote condition monitoring data using a broker

摘要

This paper describes a prototype of a technical initiative to address some of the constraints that limit effective use of "cross-industry" remote condition monitoring data: data gathered by trains about infrastructure, or by static equipment about trains. The initiative uses a "data broker" approach to simplify data sharing, promote sharing of data from different sources and tackle concerns about intellectual property, data quality and valid/permitted use. A data broker acts as an intermediary between the parties sharing data, promoting the use of open standards for the acceptance and delivery of the data, using simple formats and programming models that can be picked up easily by newcomers, and making it easy for data suppliers to provide their data to other consumers, and for consumers to gather data from multiple sources. It also provides a mechanism for data processing pipelines to be set up, allowing third parties to provide data-augmentation services such as aggregation, location-coding, storage and query, in a standard way. If successful, the prototype will become the preferred method for similar future data sharing initiatives. The industry will benefit from the resulting reduced effort and simplicity of approach, as well as from network effects as the integration of data sources and sharing of best-of-breed data processing algorithms take effect.