In a move designed to strengthen its new digital asset management business known as HMAX,
Hitachi Rail has agreed to acquire
Balfour Beatty’s digital rail monitoring business
Omnicom; this provides software and hardware for surveying, inspecting and monitoring rail infrastructure assets and includes Omnicom’s Infrastructure Monitoring System, gauge clearance measurement, line visual inspection, and scanning infrastructure.
This monitoring system can be installed on trains and uses ‘edge computing and machine learning’ to provide near-real-time anomaly detection on rail tracks. The technology collects trillions of bytes of images per day, allowing its customers to optimise their trackside maintenance. Omnicom’s remote monitoring and measurement solutions will feed into Hitachi Rail’s new HMAX suite, enabling this technology to be brought to the global market.
HMAX, which was launched at
InnoTrans 2024 last September, is a ‘comprehensive digital asset management solution’ that seamlessly integrates a vast array of live data from the train and the surrounding rail infrastructure into a single platform. This uses AI and machine learning to process the data and extract knowledge and apply it to ‘achieve operational and service enhancements’ that include traffic optimisation, reduced energy consumption, and an on-condition/predictive maintenance process.
Giuseppe Marino, Hitachi Rail’s CEO, said: “This is a strategic acquisition for Hitachi Rail. Plugging Omnicom’s pioneering track-monitoring tools into our digital asset management platform will further strengthen our global offer to optimise customers’ rail services and the surrounding infrastructure. New technological solutions such as our HMAX platform demonstrate the power of AI to enhance the performance of our railway infrastructure and systems.”