Project Update

This month, we prepared the content and agenda for our Digital Maintenance Advisory board meeting in August. All information was sent out one week in advance, in alignment with our deaf awareness principles outlined in our initial EDI blog to allow the board members to prepare and send back questions in their own time. This meeting aims to explain the requirements and challenges we have encountered through our survey and maintenance visits, as well as explain our technical solution and facilitate discussions around possible benefits of this approach and improvements. The role of the Digital Maintenance Advisory Board is to guide and provide critical insights to steer and drive current and future activities of the project. We have also been developing a whitepaper based on our findings from the project, which has now been drafted and is undergoing final tweaks before publishing, and will be published on the digital maintenance project page as well as our LinkedIn in the coming weeks.

Testing

As the project advances into its next stages, we are well-prepared for the testing, validation and verification stage of the project. The Birmingham team have developed and prepared their testbeds which contain railway rolling stock components, and emulate the behaviour of real-life rolling stock and safety-critical systems. These three testbeds have been selected to be diverse in nature, from a range of vendors and allows us to test the solution thoroughly, while replicating real-world environments.

Our stakeholder engagement continues, where more maintainers in the GB rail industry have been consulted on the project’s findings, aims and objectives, with the potential for more depot visits lined up, leveraging BCRRE and RazorSecure’s industry connections. The outputs of the depot surveys, therefore, provide a way to allow maintainers to benchmark themselves against current and future plans.

We are starting to receive a range of industry enquiries as we continue our development towards higher TRL. For example, a senior member of the freight industry, who has recently procured more than £100 million of assets will be coming for an on site visit 19th August. We have started to plan for follow on R&D funding applications, using industry and academic partnerships (UK and European). This includes capturing EU and US evolving market requirements, using EU briefings (e.g. Horizon Europe) and US National Academy of Sciences Transport Research Board publications. We are also working on promotional activities at the major Innotrans rail conference in September, applying to host a visit from UK MPs.

Equality, Diversity and Inclusion (EDI)

This month we also published our second EDI blog on our website. This blog outlined our approach to implementing our deaf awareness principles in our project, the challenges we have faced, why it is so important to adjust our processes to help others, and our recipe for deployment with the 5 scrum principles in mind. Please find the blog here.

Elsewhere, our deaf awareness principles are now also being deployed in a second project, for the Office of Rail and Road where we are providing expert advisory services on digital systems (including for high integrity software, and broader safer operation and resilience).