THE APPLIANCE OF DATA SCIENCE
IAN GORDON and JON JARRITT of Amey Strategic Consulting, part of the Amey Consulting business, explain how effective data sharing, information and analytics can be used to optimise network resources
Over the past 20 years, significant progress has been made in understanding how the physical assets that make up our transport infrastructure behave over their lifecycles, and how infrastructure managers like Network Rail can get the most from them.
Clearly, having improved engineering knowledge is useful from an asset management and whole-life-cost point of view, but that hasn’t always translated into tangible benefits for transport operators and the travelling public.
Amey Strategic Consulting aims to provide a bridge between these two distinct worlds of asset management and operations, by using its expertise in physical assets, deep asset management capability, advanced data science and analytics.
This, it argues, will help its clients to offer more reliable services and best value for money at a time of constrained capacity and - for rail at least - a rise in demand for services of more than 100% in the last two decades.
“A huge amount has been done in building up asset management knowledge, from a theoretical standpoint,” says Jonathan Jarritt, a partner at Amey Strategic Consulting. “This is all crucial in setting strategic goals over the long term, but over the last two years our work has taken us into the operational field where we have not previously seen it being applied.”
This has been demonstrated in highways, where Amey Strategic Consulting has worked with a number of tech start-ups and research bodies to look at how readily recorded data relating to traffic flows can be used to deliver shorter travel times and a safer system.
Meanwhile, understanding how the assets themselves deliver safe, reliable and modally integrated journeys will become increasingly relevant as connected autonomous vehicles begin appearing on our roads.
In rail, the company has spent almost two years adopting this end-to-end approach with Network Rail’s South East route in order to develop a deep and data-driven understanding of how conflicting and congested timetables interact with one another.
Connecting London with Kent, Surrey, Sussex and the continent, the South East route is NR’s busiest and most congested in the country, with around 5,000 trains running each day over 2,000 miles of track.
By taking a fresh and holistic view of asset management, operational management, train and station operation, and organisational processes and business cultures across the route, Amey Strategic Consulting began to piece together how data that was already being
generated by NR could be used to improve performance.
It found that timetables were being produced based on assumptions regarding the time taken for trains to load and unload passengers, and to move between stations. However, staff responsible for implementing those timetables - including drivers, station staff and signallers - rarely had visibility on how trains were actually performing against those metrics, and in which areas time was frequently being lost.
By taking live train movement data and presenting it in a meaningful way to staff at all levels, Amey Strategic Consulting was able to provide the Network Rail Route team and staff employed by its primary train operating customers (Thameslink Govia Railway and Southeastern) with a more tangible understanding of their performance against their individual responsibilities, and also help them identify where there was room for improvement - for example, more closely matching staffing levels with demand at different times of the day.
Jarritt explains: “We worked with NR on a busy part of the network that has lots of performance issues, to try and unpick them. NR already had the ability to monitor every single train, but as an industry we’d never tried to draw that into one place and then ask what it meant in terms of our strategic planning assumptions.
“With the number of people now using the railway and the sheer lack of capacity that now hampers it, we are being asked to solve problems at a level of complexity that never used to exist. It’s a huge challenge which requires a new approach, but we believe in using data science and analytics to turn that into action as one of the key vectors to meet this challenge.
“We’ve found that once you have discovered patterns then you can try and solve the problem - we don’t see many other people in the industry thinking like that and talking about both infrastructure and operations together, in a fragmented industry that has lots of contractual boundaries and is a difficult space to change.”
With that project now at an end, Amey Strategic Consulting has helped NR to employ its own data analysis staff while working with senior management to develop this new capability, and to further integrate it within the complex structure of the rail industry in order to continue to drive for further performance improvements.
According to Amey Strategic Consulting Project Director Ian Gordon, the changes made within NR and its TOC-customers are
We’ re deeply embedded in a big and difficult contract, but we want to tackle the hardest problems as they are also the opportunities for making the biggest change. Jon Jarritt, Partner, Amey Strategic Consulting
as much cultural as they are technical, by making individuals at all levels understand how they can utilise the information provided to them to establish their own performance, contribute to the bigger picture and deliver better outcomes for passengers.
He says: “It’s one thing to make data accessible to people in an organisation, such as regression models, which you can then turn into a dashboard, but it usually only goes to executive staff.
“In order to change something as fundamental as the timetable you have to provide that information to people who might not even have an internet-connected device, so you can make them understand how they contribute to the running of the wider system and therefore make a difference.”
Jarritt adds: “In the South East there were three different operators which didn’t quite fit together and, even with very skilled data analysts, it took a long time to analyse anything.
“It’s not realistic to say that artificial intelligence and data will be the silver bullets to solving everything, but we have shown that you can educate people in more effective ways to act, and that the network requires support from lots of different people.”
Following the commencement of the Wales & Borders franchise last October by a KeolisAmey joint venture, Amey Strategic Consulting now finds itself consulting internally with other parts of the Amey Group to help support the delivery of the contract.
Combining the asset and operational spaces has particular relevance to this franchise, which requires KeolisAmey to not only operate main line services throughout Wales, but to maintain infrastructure on the Valleys Lines that has recently been transferred from NR to devolved transport authority Transport for Wales.
With services running close to capacity and ageing infrastructure and rolling stock in urgent need of investment, KeolisAmey is charged with improving performance in the short term while plans are developed for the construction of a £ 5 billion South Wales Metro, due to open in 2023.
But despite the scale of the challenge, Jarritt is confident that the holistic, data-driven approach honed on NR’s South East route can be deployed throughout Wales to transform the passenger experience.
“Wales is a different beast (to the South East) really and we’re still at an early stage, but we and Transport for Wales are learning and supporting an asset management piece in Cardiff and elsewhere in Wales.
“We’re deeply embedded in a big and difficult contract, but we’ve spent a long time getting ready for it and we want to tackle the hardest problems as they are also the opportunities for making the biggest change.
“There’s a lot to do there and we are confident that we can make a big difference, which is good for Wales but also Amey as a whole, because we are willing to hold ourselves to account, as well as providing consultancy externally.”