Over the last couple of months we’ve been working hard on improving the speed of Railfleet and on a whole bunch of new Railfleet features and updates, to help you optimise your geofencing, diagnostics confirmation and maintenance planning. A couple of those features and updates are still in testing phase, but below you can find an overview of the updates that have already been released.

The new and improved Data Inspector

As our platform evolves, and clients capture new data sets from their rolling stock with the rule engine, the spectrum of data values available on Railfleet also grows. To have the Data Inspector evolve with the wide spectrum of values that’s already available on Railfleet, and to make its layout a bit more practical, the page has received quite a make-over!

The asset, time and data selector have been moved to the top of the page (just like on many of the other Railfleet features) and are now fold-out forms. Thanks to this, we’re able to show full-page graphs, which makes it easier for you to analyse them.

In the time selector you can still easily select a custom time range, but we also added a whole list of “quick ranges” you can choose from. Another novelty is that you can now specify a refresh interval: the data in the graph will automatically refresh at the chosen rate.

On the graphs you can now display any type of data that’s available for your rolling stock, and not just choose from a hard-coded catalog of message types. The data selector at the top of the page helps you to explore the available data and to select the values to display. It offers two ways to choose the new data graphs you wish to view:

1. You can free-search all the available fields for the asset using the “Quick search” option in the form
2. You can select a message type and a message key using the “Message type” and “Field name” fields in the form

In the data selector you’ll also be able to choose the type of graph you wish to see, as for some data, such as the state of a locomotive, you’ll want to see the interval, instead of a line graph.

Learn how to use the Data Inspector with the help of this guide: Using the data inspector to confirm diagnostics

Simplified geofencing on Railfleet

Railnova offers clients the possibility to be alerted when their rolling stock enters or leaves a certain geographic area, or to notify a different set of people about an alert if that alert is triggered within a specific geographic area.

Previously you had both zones and places on Railfleet for these types of alerts. Zones were polygon areas which were editable and mainly used in email dispatching, or to know if assets were in e.g. a station, while Places were uneditable single points, that were mainly used to feed the “current location” of the assets. To avoid duplicates and to simplify the way we handle cartographic data we’ve now merged these two.

The new “Places of Interest” can take the form of a line, a polygon or a single point. There are both public (non-editable) Places of Interest, such as countries, and custom (editable and private) Places of Interest, such as workshops, on Railfleet.
The custom Places of Interest can easily be created or updated in the Railfleet admin.

In the Railfleet admin you can also assign labels to any of the Places of Interest and use them for alert dispatching (to know if rolling stock is, or is not, in a certain type of place or in a specific Place of Interest). This means that you can create queries for alerts like:

• asset is (not) in PoI of type X
• asset is (not) in PoI X,Y,X (explicit list)
• asset is (not) in PoI with label X

The labels can also be used to dispatch alerts to the right people based on the location of the train, so they can take action and e.g. send a close-by mobile team to the asset if needed.

Discover how to set up your own Places of Interest with the help of this guide: Adding geographical Places of Interest

Besides those two updates we also moved the blue support button on Railfleet to the top of the page, because it sometimes blocked essential parts of the application.

We asked for your feedback on the change, and as a convincing 92,5% of the feedback we received was positive, the button will keep its new position. A big thank you to everyone who took part in the poll!

That’s it for this “New on Railfleet” update! Keep an eye on our blog for more news about features and updates, and, as always, don’t hesitate to contact us if you have questions about the latest changes or Railfleet in general.