Like the recent tragic MetroNorth accident outside New York City, it is likely that the derailment of an Amtrak train near Philadelphia last Tuesday, which so far has cost eight lives, could have been prevented if the right technology had been in place.
The technology falls under the broad rubric of the Internet of Things, and it’s about time we started using it as a matter of course, particularly when it comes to matters of public safety.
The IoT comprises sensors that collect data from heretofore inert machines, infrastructure, devices, and other “things;” the internet and other networks that transmit that data; and analytics that help people or the things themselves make decisions in real or near-real time.
The technology has a broad range of potential applications, from making appliances more useful to helping improve the uptime of industrial equipment. Most obviously, it could help prevent needless accidents.
However, today, most railroads use much older systems that rely on barriers at railroad crossings. For the most part, they don’t use internet-based technologies that could slow or stop trains.
“We don’t put enough money in our railroads,” Stephen R. Szegedy, a retired engineer who designed an older sensor-based system while working for the Connecticut Department of Transportation, told NBC this spring in the aftermath of the earlier MetroNorth crash. “It’s an infrastructure system that needs to be brought into the twenty-first century.”
That isn’t the case everywhere. Union Pacific, which operates freight trains west of the Mississippi, has been using sensors on its trains for years to measure acoustics under its rail carriages, paired with data analytics to determine if certain sounds indicate that ball bearings in the wheels are about to give way. UP CIO Lyndon Tennison once told me that using these sensors reduced derailments by 75% and avoided tens of millions of dollars in costs.
Indeed, railroads are supposed to put in place a new system, known as Positive Train Control, by the end of 2015. PTC is a GPS-based safety technology capable of preventing train-to-train collisions, over-speed derailments, unauthorized incursion into work zones, and train movement through switches left in the wrong position.
Many railroads have asked for an extension of the deadline to implement the technology. Amtrak has begun installing components of a PTC system, but the network is not yet functioning, federal officials told Reuters. Only last month, senators introduced a bill intended to speed the introduction of PTC.
Amtrak posted a message on its website Saturday touting a "very strong" safety record, including a claim that yearly derailments fell from 80 to 28 between 2000 and 2014, according to the Associated Press.
"While any train derailment is unacceptable, it has been 28 years since a derailment resulting in a passenger fatality occurred on the Northeast Corridor," Amtrak said.... Company spokesman Craig Schulz said Saturday that Amtrak plans to look into whether it can partially activate some of the [PTC] capabilities already installed along the Northeast Corridor without delaying the complete activation of the next-generation system later this year.
Meantime, the IoT is taking off in meaningful ways in other industries—even the mainstream press is taking notice. The Wall Street Journal devoted a full-page article to Volkmar Denner, the CEO of German engineering and manufacturing giant Robert Bosch, who said he’s “betting the future of his company…on the ‘Internet of Things.’
He aims to connect everyday wares and devices over the internet, fueling the rise of “smart” homes and cars. And he wants to digitize Bosch manufacturing in “smart” factories.
Michael Porter, the famed Harvard University business maven, told Computerworld’s Patrick Thibodeau that data aggregated from products connected via the Internet “will be used to schedule maintenance when it is needed, and not against a schedule that requires maintenance whether the product needs it or not. Usage data will feed back into product design, and predictive analytics will be used to reduce failures and outages.”
Eventually, the IoT will deliver products that decide "what they should continuously do without human intervention," Porter said. "We believe that this is going to give a real opportunity for a surge of growth—a surge of productivity, a surge of innovation."
And in the case of public transportation, perhaps IoT will bring an enhanced ability to react to potentially hazardous situations, for example by remotely sensing excessive train speeds and slowing trains or alerting conductors.
