Swiss Federal Railways (SBB CFF FFS) and its pre-trained models.

With the "Pantograph Scanner" and the two models that we are making available to the public, we want to contribute some of the work that we have done over the years to optimise business processes with newer technologies.

In an integrated Railway System, such as at Swiss Federal Railways (SBB), there exist use-cases in the interaction of rolling stock with rail infrastructure, which are of high interest to monitor the condition of the involved technical systems. Condition Monitoring as a discipline helps to manage failure-modes appropriately and helps to prevent failure-modes to occur, by applying specific counter measures (maintenance tasks) to them. Predicting a certain failure-mode to happen is the capability to execute the maintenance tasks predefined at the right moment, yet before the failure-mode is occurring.

Those concepts are well known for decades. The challenge lays therein, that operators, manufacturers, OEMs, maintenance have not yet agreed in a failure-data set for the Rail industry, something that in contrary exists for oil and gas, wind turbines, nuclear facilities, etc. So generally spoken, we are on a journey toward fulfilling that vision for Rail. But – we would like to share our experience to a broader community and start with a first example and model(s) that we are going to contribute.

Urs Gehrig Bern, in March 2024