CRC for Rail Manufacturing – keeping train services on time

00:02 (Dr Stuart Thompson, CEO and Managing Director Rail Manufacturing CRC) Rail patronage is growing by about 20% per annum in most capital cities and this really means that current infrastructure will struggle to maintain or keep maintaining the current services

00:16 (Mike Ayling, GM Digital Technology & Innovation, Downer) So dwell time is the time that the train spends in a platform loading and unloading passengers. If you can reduce the dwell time in the station and you can get more trains per hour,

00:29 more trains per hour or 24 hours mean more passengers. More passengers throughout the network is a great thing for train operators today.

[Camera with dwell track technology mounted in a station is shown, followed by a Dwell Track screen showing passenger numbers and dwell time at different locations]

00:36 (Dr Stuart Thompson) Dwell track is a technology that can be mounted on a rail platform to monitor passenger movements from A to B. By obtaining this data and understanding passenger movements we can make key decisions about where to put infrastructure in the future and how to use different types of levers to move those people more quickly.

00:57 (Michael Diponio, Chief Software Engineer, University of Technology Sydney) Once we know where a person is, we can project that to a position and this indicator at the bottom shows a unique identifier for each person, and when the person moves around it shows the path they've taken.

01:08 (Alex Virgona, PhD student, University of Technology Sydney) The potential for this technology is very broad. I think that fundamentally this enables autonomous monitoring and understanding and metrics and analysis of people's movement in public spaces. So anywhere you have a public space with large amounts of people you can gather data there and optimize the way that space is run.

01:29 (Dr Stuart Thompson) A Dwell Track trial will take place at one of the busiest rail stations within Australia later this year. We look forward to this trial demonstrating the capacity of Dwell Track to monitor passengers, not just within a rail environment but anywhere where people movements need to be monitored from point A to point B. We believe the value of this technology will have merit not only domestically but will have broad appeal on a global scale.

01:55 [Music plays, with logos for Downer, UTS, Rail Manufacturing CRC and the Australian Government Department of Industry, Innovation and Science – Business Cooperative Research Centres Programme]