KM2ME Mobile Application
Whether its fresh produce, grain, coal or construction materials, moving goods across our vast country is no easy feat.
However, Australia’s growing population and expanding economy demand it. The Australian Rail Track Corporation (ARTC) strive to improve safety, reliability and transit times, and capacity for the interstate freight and passenger rail markets.
ARTC is responsible for managing a large proportion of Australia’s national interstate rail network. In fact, the government-owned corporation looks after more than 8500 route kilometres of interstate track across five states.
The Australian Rail Track Corporation consulted the former Spatial Vision team now operating in Veris, to produce a new and improved kilometrage application, KM2ME to support asset management and worker safety.
The Challenge
Every year ARTC undertakes millions of dollars’ worth of rail maintenance across Australia, including track repairs and reconditioning. This work is critical to ensuring that the tracks are safe and reliable for the hundreds of trains using the network every day.
To understand where maintenance needs to occur, the ARTC uses a kilometre referencing system that relies on physical posts in the ground every kilometre that are uniquely numbered. The post locations are mapped and the numbers used to identify locations of assets on the rail network. One of the issues the ARTC faced was that these posts are not accurately spaced therefore making it a challenging task to precisely locate these posts. To resolve this issue, the former Spatial Vision team were engaged to create an application that accurately displays post positions and allows users to easily locate their position on the tracks. The new app was to be designed to assist maintenance personnel in managing and undertaking works more effectively.
The Solution
KM2ME is an application that calculates a user’s current corridor location as a kilometrage reference based on their GPS location.
The newly developed application for iOS consolidates vast amounts of data including updated reference data into a scalable, modern and user-friendly view that enables users to quickly and efficiently locate themselves in relation to the kilometrage posts mapped along the network. Information about tracks nearby including nearby kilometrage posts can be gained through the app, with GPS location updating every ten seconds for precise positioning.
The app also allows users to capture and tag photos with location information including GPS references and kilometrage information, and measure the distance travelled. This information can then be sent back to the office via the app to assist with logging and determining future maintenance. Longitude and latitude coordinates can also be viewed and recorded for organisations such as emergency services to locate users.
Adopting agile methodologies, the former Spatial Vision team worked closely with the ARTC at every stage to build and adapt the solution to fit their requirements. In the process, the team underwent significant research and development to create a solution that would efficiently bring together the large quantities of data into a high-speed application.
The Benefits
Benefits of the mobile application include the following:
- Assists in promoting proactive maintenance logging
- Enables accurate spatial and GPS data references to be quickly generated
- Customised solution with ongoing support providing scope for future updates and developments.