KONUX announces three new European railway customers

01.10.2019

Munich. Munich-based AI start-up KONUX continues to expand its international business activities: The company has begun several new pilot projects in Europe for railway operators in France, Spain and Belgium. KONUX combines smart sensors and AI-based analytics to enable higher train punctuality and network capacity through predictive maintenance planning.

For Europe’s second-largest rail infrastructure provider, French railway company SNCF Réseau, KONUX is monitoring the health condition of the switches along two high-speed lines. The project’s goal is to predict at what point in time the degradation will become critical, in order to optimize maintenance planning and avoid failures. One of the projects takes place along the high-speed line Ligne à grande vitesse Atlantique ("LGV Atlantique”) between Paris and Le Mans/Tours. Another implementation of the KONUX system monitors the high-speed line “LGV Nord”, connecting Paris and Lille.

The pilot projects run for six months and the overall objective is to take the first step towards a digital maintenance system, in order to reduce maintenance cost and increase availability in the mid- to long-term. As Michel Morin, Head of Track, SNCF Réseau, puts it: "Why do we at SNCF Réseau want to move to predictive maintenance? It’s about being able to intervene at the right place, at the right time, with the right method."

Catalan railway company FGC has asked KONUX to monitor switches along the 340 km railway network in the greater Barcelona area. FGC’s Infrastructure Director, Albert Tortajada, said: “In the future, assets management in railway will be mainly supported by predictive models, instead of classic preventive maintenance. Rail infrastructure is still one step behind other kinds of installations such as communications networks or rolling stock. We expect that systems like the one we are testing in our network will help to fill this gap.”

Belgian railway infrastructure company Infrabel has chosen KONUX to digitally monitor a number of switches in the Region of Mons, some 50 km south of Brussels. Infrabel’s Manager switches, Annelies Stevens, said: “Infrabel is constantly looking to improve punctuality for all trains and to reduce the impact of maintenance for the operators. Predictive maintenance has a positive impact on both. However, the challenge is to find the right parameters/measurements to develop a trustful predictive model and to analyze efficiently the large amounts of data that are available. One thing we really want to monitor is the track bed stability in switches and crossings as tamping is a typical cyclic maintenance operation that is expensive and the impact, positive or negative, is difficult to evaluate without continuous measurements. Therefore, we are very glad to collaborate with KONUX who has developed monitoring tools and predictive models in this domain and already has experience in several countries.”

KONUX co-founder and CEO, Andreas Kunze, said: “We are very pleased that SNCF Réseau, FGC and Infrabel have decided to entrust our company to help them with their challenging tasks. Our smart AI/IoT solution is now in use in many European countries, with more international regions to follow shortly. Thus, we enable the railway companies to plan their maintenance well ahead of damage and avoid train delays. This both reduces operating costs for the railways and makes rail transport much more attractive for passengers through increased train punctuality. KONUX is well on its way to becoming the defining solution for the digitization of international railway systems.”

Learn more about the KONUX Predictive Maintenance System here.

KONUX is continuously expanding its current team of 70 people. All open positions can be found here.

About KONUX

KONUX is a leading German AI/IoT startup, providing smart sensor systems and AI-based analytics to deliver actionable insights and enable predictive maintenance. Since its foundation in 2014, KONUX has raised more than $50 million from world leading investors and was selected by the World Economic Forum (WEF) as one of the world’s 30 most innovative start-ups and scale-ups worldwide. For more information please go to www.konux.com.

Contact

Dr. Hans Juergen Croissant
KONUX Company Spokesperson
Tel: +49 163 7013035
Email: [email protected]