Project Update - September
September has been a busy month. The RazorSecure and BCRRE team were at the 4 day Innotrans conference in Berlin, with more than 50,000 attendees. With Digital Maintenance a topic of clear interest for many, new opportunities for future trials were explored, with operators and manufacturers, in the UK and overseas. The team also presented to the UK cross-industry Asset Integrity Group which is dedicated to leading collaborative activity on the topic of infrastructure and rolling stock asset integrity [Asset Integrity Group (RSSB)].
All project documentation was completed and submitted to Connected Places Catapult.
Digital Maintenance Advisory Board
Our second and final Digital Maintenance Advisory Board meeting occurred on the 14th September, which was incredibly successful. The Board members provided positive feedback on the demonstrated solution, as well as hopes for the future. 2 providers have agreed to work with us in the future for testing.
The Advisory Board agreed on the following points:
The DMAB evaluated the detailed design and ongoing test results and provided positive challenge and technical recommendations for the next stage of development including:
· Implementing the option to limit an engineer’s maintenance activity to one active session at the time in order to minimise the potential for human error
· Enhancing the functionality of manager’s view of the ticketing pipeline so that different tasks, units, depots, locations, times or maintenance engineers could be selected
· Implementing additional checks to ensure that a train and technicians are in the correct and expected location (e.g. geofencing)
· Engaging with third party suppliers and providing them with browser-based access to the Digital Maintenance system
· Differentiating between best practice that can be implemented within the secure maintenance gateway and identifying recommendations for third party suppliers and supply chain
· Prioritising certain types of onboard systems for initial Digital Maintenance integration
· Recording and offboarding logfiles to wayside to support forensics, with further development for integration with incident response, accessing onboard systems and revoking and controlling access to key systems
· Development of APIs for onboard integration and evaluation of data exchange with maintenance and workflow systems
Next Steps
The Digital Maintenance team confirmed that in principle all the recommendations for the next stage of development are technically feasible, for both local and remote use cases. Further integration with the train to understand its operational state and location will be needed. Further engagement with depot teams is needed to optimise integration of Digital Maintenance into the busy, complex and changing schedule of depots. This will include physical security measures to manage unauthorised and unauthenticated access to network connection points.
2. An in-depth presentation on the security design basis and implementation for Digital Maintenance highlighted the use of multiple measures to ensure that only authenticated users were able to access the system and execute certain tasks on certain trains at certain times.
3. An update on the ongoing test programme was given noting some fixes needed around hard coded IP addresses. The majority of the utilities used for the testing were open source or COTS. DHCP addressing capabilities were confirmed integral to the test bed design.
4. Market drivers and opportunities for expansion into other sectors and other networking technologies were identified. The Digital Maintenance team confirmed that a high proportion of the underlying technologies were portable across different manufacturers and platforms.
5. Some members of the DMAB offered the opportunity to evaluate onboard trials of the Digital Maintenance system through access to new trains. Discussions are planned, installations will potentially also include existing Intrusion Detection Systems to monitor the environment in which maintenance is being carried out.
6. The DMAB agreed to continue meeting in 2023 and to extend the membership to freight operators. Activities will include providing feedback on ongoing developments, supporting future research and development, providing opportunities for trial and promoting opportunities for future development of standards and guidance. A Digital Maintenance Strategy is under development.
Further presentations are planned in October to the Rail Freight Group (https://rfg.org.uk/event/webinar-digital-innovation-with-a-focus-on-security) who supported and to the UK’s Rail Delivery Group Fleet Challenge team, representing all UK operators. We will also be briefing our project sponsors Northern and DB Cargo and Rail Freight Group and DB Cargo will join as freight members in the Digital Maintenance Advisory Board.
EDI Updates
We continue to seek feedback from the industry on our EDI principles and practices, and have published our third EDI blog explaining the feedback we have received and implemented.