Enabling Safe and Reliable Digital Maintenance in Rail

Digital maintenance and software maintenance are increasingly important across the railway network. Our project is to demonstrate a proof of concept for managing a number of safety-related application conditions as part of maintenance of these digital systems.

Our goal is a solution for secure maintenance operations capable of integration with legacy and new railway vehicles. This will support the integrity and reliability of rail services, through addressing some of the causes of poorly managed digital maintenance that have led to operational problems.

As part of the development we want to hear from across the train industry as to the challenges they face and the potential barriers to taking advantage of advances in digital innovation to increase operational efficiency. We will take an inclusive approach to this engagement.

The process of digital maintenance in the industry is diverse and also carries a lot of technical debt. Laptops and systems used for digital maintenance may be as old as the asset itself, which can lead to issues with obsolescence, security and patch management, and where individual software packages conflict with others. We’re trying to manage this risk by developing a solution that puts a secure ‘wrapper’ around the maintenance applications to remove the need to run that software on unsupported hardware and operating systems, whilst also adding in further controls which that software may have not been capable of (e.g., competency and authorisation management).

The project demonstrates solutions for secure digital maintenance that will benefit the train industry by addressing pain points with cyber security, competence management and logistics associated with current practices. More efficient, reliable and consistent digital maintenance will also contribute to increasing train availability for the travelling public. RazorSecure and Birmingham University shared learning outcomes through an extensive programme of engagement to help stakeholders across the industry including equipment manufacturers and train manufacturers benefit from a broader awareness of digital maintenance challenges and best practice.

RazorSecure - Project Lead

RazorSecure provides cybersecurity solutions to ensure the safety and security of rail systems. RazorSecure has experience supporting projects across Europe and North America, with deployments on over 1600 rail vehicles. RazorSecure offers products and services to enhance railway cyber security, by protecting networks and monitoring key systems. We deliver this through our flexible approach to cyber security, designed specifically for rolling stock, signalling and infrastructure systems.

Collaborators - University of Birmingham

The Birmingham Centre for Railway Research and Education at the University of Birmingham is Europe’s largest university-based railway R&D centre. It specialises in railway operations, systems engineering, cybersecurity and data management, and condition monitoring for the rail industry. The centre staff have experience assessing the security of critical national infrastructure, and have applied those techniques to rail-specific contexts including the signalling system. The centre has previously supported 3 spin-outs, developing routes to market.

The project began in March 2022 and was completed in September 2022. The project involved an initial phase of data collection, through maintenance site visits, interviews and an online survey. Gap analysis of a generic baseline architecture, along with our collected data, will aid in creation of a system requirement specification. The solution to 3 safety-related maintenance controls will be developed and demonstrated, using Birmingham's testbeds to validate and verify our solutions. Webinars and outreach events will be held during the project's lifetime to inform others of our project progress and outputs.

The project delivered a comprehensive review of current digital maintenance practices, capturing the operational challenges, safety and security vulnerabilities involved. Combining this valuable learning with a study of train systems architecture, the project implemented a test bench evaluation of technical solutions providing safety and security controls to improve digital maintenance.

Between RazorSecure and the University of Birmingham, through our own engagements with industry, we’ve heard across the sector that technical obsolescence is becoming a significant issue for maintainers. We formed a team to work with Connected Places Catapult to identify and prototype potential technical solutions.

To support this and other joint activities, RazorSecure and University of Birmingham have also signed a MOU in March 2022.

To ensure that the commercial and research outputs of RazorSecure and Birmingham respectively apply to the widest possible audience in the rail sector, we work in an independent and agnostic way to ensure that we cater to the needs across the sector.

RazorSecure's customers are diverse, from train builders and systems integrators to train operators and public transport authorities across the world. We will use our experience and comprehensive understanding of train network architectures to ensure the project outputs consider a wide range of scenarios.

In this project, Birmingham acted in an advisory and validation role to ensure that the needs of the rail sector are met, and that the outputs of the project are not focused on one specific stakeholder’s requirements. The testbeds they operate are designed to be agnostic and work in a plug-and-play fashion, allowing a range of OEMs and manufacturer systems to be integrated and tested.

If you want to get in contact, please email contact@razorsecure.com for any questions or queries.

Through this project and development of a proof of concept demonstrator for digital maintenance, our goal was also to increase awareness and understanding of the increasingly important area of Equality Diversity and Inclusion. By engaging broadly, we aim to build skills and connections, increasing the number of people who are familiar with digital maintenance.

Throughout the project we worked to make our meetings deaf aware, so that there is equality of engagement for all, whether they are hearing impaired or not. We’ve recorded a video explaining our approach and how we believe doing this can help inclusion across the board.

https://youtu.be/srtIPLTvXNE

Some specific activities include:

• Creation of a ‘Digital Maintenance Advisory Board’ primarily from under-represented groups to directly monitor and challenge the project delivery.

• Implementation of EDI best practice from organisations, including what they’ve found has worked well and what can be further improved

• EDI will be an agenda item at each project meeting

Throughout our project we’ll look for opportunities to share our lessons learned and areas for improvement, through videos and blogs.

For more information on our Digital Maintenance Advisory Board see our Terms Of Reference document.

We have since published some of our findings on deaf awareness throughout the project in blog form:

Equality, Diversity and Inclusion at RazorSecure

Implementing EDI principles into our projects - what have we learned so far?

Feedback from the deaf community and rail industry