Resources > Case Study > Mango Monitoring Helps The London Underground Improve Passenger Experience and Safety

Mango Monitoring Helps The London Underground Improve Passenger Experience and Safety

Radix IoT Helps London Underground improve passenger safety

Overview

The London Underground is a rail network that transports millions of people every day. Their two main goals are safety and the reduction of delays and inconvenience to their riders. They needed a way to improve passenger and technician safety and service to customers by boosting the efficiency of their axle counter maintenance, helping to reduce the number and duration of line closures. (An axle counter is a device that detects and reports the clear or occupied status of a track.)

The London Underground discovered Mango, which now captures and analyzes 8 million data points per day from their safety systems.

"We needed to partner with a forward-thinking data storage and analytics solution provider. Mango’s real time API makes what we do possible. Mango has proven to be a robust, high performance data storage solution.

And Mango has helped me in ways I never expected it to. The charting, real time watch lists and administration capabilities of the Mango web interface have been a real help to us. They help us understand the data we collect so we have been better at showing London Underground technicians what is important to them.

Automated incremental backups and low resource usage keep our systems administrators happy too. All in all, we're very happy with the software and support we receive."

- Gary Ott, Software Engineer
Approach
Data Collection Units (DCUs) send data and may receive back configuration changes.
When the Data Collection Service receives data, it reads the asset management database to find the device the DCU is monitoring.
The Data Collection Service stores the data in the Mango NoSQL database. Asset Management Services uses its own database to keep track of assets, engineers’ notes, etc.
The Asset Management Services uses the Mango API to perform initial configuration of data points when a user creates a new monitorable device and whenever monitoring data is subsequently requested by a user.
Asset Monitor Web App requests data and initiates actions by the API provided by Asset Management Service.

The Results

In addition to providing real-time intelligence and alarming, Mango’s ability to analyze historical data produces insights into the failure modes of axle counters that were not possible before. Through investigation of past hardware failures, it is now possible to recognize and prevent failures or enhance readiness to deal with them when they occur.

The London Underground have evolved their understanding of how to look after the axle counters they monitor. Using advanced techniques, they're able to provide real time alerts and profile individual devices to detect gradual deterioration that may indicate the need for maintenance.

They are actually improving overall reliability while spending less time performing maintenance. Technicians can now be directed to axle counters most in need of maintenance instead of needlessly interfering with devices in good working order.

Mango is a modern web-based software package that integrates asset management and monitoring, to which plug-in modules may be added. Taking advantage of Mangos RESTful API, the customer’s initiative systems are tailored to enable end users to enter devices of various types, attach monitoring equipment and start collecting data without assistance or complicated configuration.

Ready to Learn More?

Leveraged by telecom, energy, datacenters and facilities’ operations worldwide – the Radix IoT platform seamlessly unifies data across pre-existing assets and systems. As a result, our customers get the real-time data insights needed to more effectively manage their operations and better protect their bottom line. We invite you to learn more – request a demo today!