Thales launches Digital Services, powered by a digital platform to revolutionise mobility

• Intelligent decision-making for the transport industry is powered by the latest technologies, such as big data analytics, cloud technologies, internet of things and machine learning, all hosted and secured by a digital platform.
• These technologies will provide outstanding benefits to both operators and passengers by improving performance and reliability, and reducing the costs of operating transportation networks.
• Thales embraces digital transformation, through connectivity and its ability to analyse large amounts of complex data to constantly improve decision making and travellers’ mobility.

To help customers achieve their big ambitions, Thales is launching Digital Services that will deliver outstanding benefits for transport operators, maintainers and passengers. Companies are constantly exploring opportunities to improve operational efficiencies and passenger experience, and digital transformation is the best way to do this. 

Core to this new range of services is a digital platform, addressing many challenges facing the transport industry, such as allowing for on-premises and cloud deployment, supporting companies in different stages of their digital transformation journey. In order to guarantee data privacy, the platform is cybersecured by design using Thales’s worldwide experience in cyber security. Guavus, a Thales company pioneer in real time data analytics for the telecommunication industry, powers the platform, enabling customers analyse huge volumes of data for the best decision making in real time.

The digital platform allows customers to easily manage, develop and deploy solutions using the latest technology as it is built using open-architectural principles and is fully configurable. This means that all future-generation Thales products and services will operate from this single digital platform, as well as enabling the integration with customer’s internal applications and third-party solutions.

What is the added value to customers?

We start by understanding our customers’ core problems and pain points. With this information, multiple data sources from in-service assets are collected and collated – such as network and asset data, operational data, signalling data, maintenance data, and passenger flow and ticketing data. All this complex data are then processed, analysed and stored in the secure cloud environment, then presented to individual customers as a range of trends and predictions that will enable them to make more forward thinking and intelligent evidence-based decisions to address their pain points.

The digital platform is perfectly suited to supporting the big ambitions of transport operators as it can be used by customers to optimise performance and reliability, and improve the passenger experience, helping to reduce the whole-life cost of the railway.

A new set of services for the digital age

• Here at Innotrans 2018 Thales is demonstrating two new digital applications. The first - TIRIS – is a predictive maintenance service that provides operations and maintenance intelligence to customers.

The vast swathes of data are processed and analysed to provide customers with a prediction of when a part may fail so that they can accurately schedule in and budget for ‘just-in time’ maintenance. 

By reducing in-service failures and unplanned maintenance, this digital service benefits passengers who will no longer get stuck on a broken-down train, or miss a train due to an asset failure, such as points or signalling. It also reduces the whole-life costs of running transportation networks for rail infrastructure managers and train operators by reducing the cost of maintenance by much as 30%, and increasing workforce productivity.

• The second application - NAIA – is a passenger journey analytic tool that creates insights around passenger journeys allowing the operator to improve the experience of the travelling public by optimising the timetable, and maximising revenue collection through better informed planning of fare policy. It can also increase revenue streams through more targeted marketing and advertising campaigns, and better customer satisfaction will generate savings on the deployment of customer service resources.

The new digital services capability is the result of more than 10 years of research and extensive field tests with a range of national and urban rail transport operators.