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Hitachi Rail has completed the acquisition of Omnicom from Balfour Beatty, expanding its HMAX digital asset management platform to Help enhance railway operations and maintenance.
The acquisition marks a strategic step in enhancing rail infrastructure monitoring and predictive maintenance capabilities.
Hitachi Rail acquired Omnicom, a digital rail monitoring business, from international infrastructure group Balfour Beatty. This strategic acquisition helps to support the growth of the HMAX platform, which is already installed in over 2,000 trains worldwide. Omnicom’s proprietary sensor technology will now integrate with HMAX to help customers further optimize trackside maintenance.
Key Highlights
Omnicom solutions include software and hardware for surveying, inspecting, and monitoring rail infrastructure assets, including overhead lines and tracks.
The monitoring technology can be installed on trains and uses edge computing and machine learning to provide near real-time anomaly detection on rail tracks.
The system can capture trillions of bytes of image data per day, helping to enable operators to further optimize maintenance planning and extend asset lifecycles.
HMAX integrates live data from trains and surrounding rail infrastructure into a single platform, leveraging Lumada 3.0’s digital capabilities. Lumada is Hitachi's advanced digital solutions, services and technologies for turning data into insights to help drive digital innovation.
The platform supports traffic optimization, energy consumption reduction, and predictive maintenance processes through AI and machine learning.
Data is processed at the edge, in trains or infrastructure, in real time, with only relevant insights sent to operational control centers, helping to reduce decision-making delays.
HMAX combines these capabilities with its existing digital asset management tools to help rail operators make faster, data-driven decisions. By processing information at the edge and delivering actionable insights in real time, the platform supports improved safety, operational efficiency, and the long-term sustainability of rail infrastructure.
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