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9/15/2015

Electro-Motive Diesel Inc.: Advanced Rail Platform

Progress Rail Services subsidiary Electro-Motive Diesel Inc. (EMD) is developing a technology platform designed to analyze, integrate and visualize data from a variety of railroad equipment and business systems. The platform enables authorized users to access, monitor and take action on various aspects of a railroad’s operations to improve asset utilization, optimize efficiency and performance, and ultimately increase profitability, EMD officials said.

The Advanced Rail Platform utilizes cloud computing, mobility, analytics, machine learning, data fusion and optimization to provide actionable information that railroads can use to minimize or eliminate unplanned downtime. EMD also uses this data to continually improve its locomotives and services. This, in turn, enables the company to help solve problems in the rail industry, EMD officials said.

Features of EMD’s Advanced Rail Platform include real-time monitoring and analytics of locomotive fault and operating parameters; advanced algorithms for failure prediction; and mobility applications, including metrics, key performance indicators and dashboards.

Additionally, the technology provides automatically generated locomotive troubleshooting guides and repair recommendations, as well as a cloud-based portal providing scalable user access and performance.

These features are “only the beginning” of a suite of applications being developed by EMD and Uptake to tackle some of the most challenging problems facing the global rail industry, EMD officials said.