A bright future beckons for transport operators who seize digital opportunities

“Have a bright day!” This is the cheery moniker of Brightline, the Florida startup bringing fresh thinking to U.S. train travel.  

Boasting state-of-the-art stations, sustainability credentials and a level of customer service akin to a smart hotel, one reviewer described it as, “the best 30 minutes you can have on a train right now.”

The only privately owned and operated intercity passenger railroad in the U.S., Brightline is designed to transform perceptions of travel in the modern age.

It epitomises the disruptive – and yet positive – forces at play in the transport sector, where the travelling public desperately need an improved level of service.

This upheaval, which is happening at a breathtaking pace, is a reality not only for rail owner operators, but for all transport leaders.  

Survive and thrive with a digital mindset

Survival in this environment demands agility, and asset owner operators in rail, ports and airports need to respond by establishing digital strategies to manage their infrastructure.

Spreadsheet management of complex infrastructure assets and siloed data (some of it outdated and unreliable) is no longer tenable. It needs to be improved by a connected and harmonised data management approach to support digital modelling and visualisation tools.

Why? Because it’s the only way to ensure complete control over your assets, predict issues before they occur, drive peak asset and operational performance at all times and, most importantly, to deliver an enhanced service to your customers.

In early March 2024, Michael Salvato, Vice President for Advisory Services at Mott MacDonald, and I spoke on this subject at the Transit State of Good Repair Conference in Washington D.C. in front of multiple industry experts and representatives from around the world.

At the conference, we shared examples of where owner operators are reaping the rewards of adopting digital solutions to drive enhanced asset management. These rewards include increased efficiency, reduced costs and increased sustainability.

We examined those first steps that any owner operator needs to take: identify the datasets needed to define the asset performance baseline; manage your assets against that baseline; consider their collective behaviour as part of a process or system to provide a service; and define the insights that you need from a digital strategy that will help you to meet your business goals.

We also explored the role of engineering information management standards.

Success at Sydney Airport

Those blazing a trail in this area include Sydney Airport (SYD). One of the world’s oldest airports, it is set to become one of the most advanced in how it maintains and manages its assets.

Cohesive and our parent company, Bentley Systems, have been working with the airport to help connect its many and complex data sources. These had been scattered across its different business units and stored in varied databases and systems, leading to a deep distrust of the quality of the information by the team to provide the insights that they needed.

The airport’s architects, civil engineers, airfield designers, GIS experts and surveyors wanted to ensure that any authorised user could access accurate relevant information quickly without printing PDFs or creating more spreadsheets, and without the delay of asking the team for correlating information. The airport needs a system which is scalable, open and capable of managing and maintaining future integrations.

With solutions including iTwin Experience, the airport has been integrating financial, asset metadata, models and documents and, ultimately, aims to establish a fully-fledged, real-time digital twin of the airport.

Speaking in 2022, Kim Cohen, team leader of the Sydney Airport project, said that the airport was already seeing benefits. She suggested that, if 200 users of the Maps@Syd project accessed the integrated data platform just once a day, they would save 5,280 hours per year. This project is continuing to develop and enhance the airport’s digitalised information management approach, and the next phase of growth is being planned that will further increase data quality, reliability and accuracy.

Cohesive and Mott MacDonald are helping large infrastructure asset management organisations to create digital data management strategies that will make their decision-making much more effective.

Other forward-looking clients in the airport, port and rail sectors have sought our expertise for digital solutions centred on engineering data management and technology solutions that cover the full asset lifecycle. For the operations and maintenance phase, Cohesive implements IBM Maximo, being the largest and most experienced global provider.

The depth of our experience and knowledge was underlined recently in a report from Verdantix, the independent advisory and research firm. In its ‘Green Quadrant: Industrial Asset Management Technology Implementation Services 2024′ report, it named Cohesive as a leader in enterprise asset management digital implementations and noted our ‘strong’ asset reliability and integrity capabilities. You can download the report here.

Being bold, probing the possibilities and thinking digitally about management of critical infrastructure assets is the way for a bright future. Let’s work together to go full steam ahead.

For more information on how Cohesive can help you to optimise the performance of your assets, please contact [email protected].