Can we use IEC 61850 for safety related functions?

Safety is an essential issue for processes that present high risk for human beings and environment. An acceptable level of risk is obtained both with actions on the process itself (risk reduction) and with the use of special safety systems that switch the process into safe mode when a fault or an abnormal operation mode happens. These safety systems are today based on digital devices that communicate through digital networks. The IEC 61508 series specifies the safety requirements of all the devices that are involved in a safety function, including the communication network. Also electrical generation and distribution systems are processes that may have a significant level of risk, so the criteria stated by the IEC 61508 applies.Starting from this consideration, the paper analyzes the safety requirement for the communication network and compare them with the services of the communication protocol IEC 61850 that represents the most used protocol for automation of electrical plants. The goal of this job is to demonstrate that, from the technical point of view, IEC 61850 can be used for implementing safety-related functions, even if a formal safety certification is still missing

Data acquisition, transmission, collection and analysis for a fleet of railway vehicles in search of diagnostic rules for CBM

This paper presents a roadmap for a Company that manages a fleet of vehicles (or machineries) towards the Condition Based Maintenance that is, in principle, the most efficient maintenance policy. The paper associates to each maintenance policy its benefits and its requirements in terms of infrastructure and costs. Using the proposed roadmap, a Company can decide its strategy and can schedule the investments in terms of technologies and skills. Bombardier Transportation Italy started this roadmap few years ago, for moving from a reactive maintenance policy to a proactive policy where some key indicators are measured and monitored to optimize (and reduce) the maintenance interventions. The paper presents the first results achieved by means of an analytical tool developed together with the Dept. DITEN of the University of Genoa applied to the fleet of Bombardier locomotives in Europe. Two examples of statistical analysis on the data collected from the fleet of vehicles of Bombardier in Europe show how even very simple analytics may lead to important technological and economical results

Methods, techniques and algorithms for condition based maintenance of railway vehicles

Industrial Companies must avoid productivity losses due to low availability of equipment and machinery that cause high maintenance costs. In response to this concern, Companies try improving their maintenance policies over the years. Increasing the effectiveness of maintenance implies switching from simply reacting to machinery breakdowns (corrective maintenance - CM), to executing time-based preventive maintenance (PM). Today's emphasis is on the ability of detecting early degradation through condition based maintenance (CBM) practices. Each policy offers a different level of performances, and it requires a different amount of data for its actuation. This paper analyses methods to implement CBM for a fleet of locomotives. It presents the description of the Automatic Vehicle Inspection System (AVIS), to deliver a revolutionary integrated solution that could become a game changer in the rolling stock maintenance industry. A Company can implement a Condition- Based Maintenance solution with the usage of the AVIS System and a data conditioning and analysis software like OSIsoft PI System. The paper also highlights the reasons for choosing this type of maintenance policy and for using the PI System to collect operations and manufacturing data. The results have been achieved making use at the same time of the PI System (that manages the database) and Matlab (that manages data) applied to the fleet of railway vehicles. The possibilities with this system are endless, since with its flexibility, adding new features is very easy. Results show different aspects for a good maintenance policy: reliable and high quality measurements are important; a condition-based maintenance would provide longer life of the components compared to the current policy; at the end, a new maintenance policy would result in high savings for the Company