Golden Rock (GR) Workshop from Southern Railway has bagged the first prize jointly with North-East Railway for best Innovation on Indian Railway. It bagged the award for developing and implementing Internet of Things based smart energy management and condition monitoring system for energy-intensive machines and substation low tension panels.
Organised annually by the efficiency and research directorate of the Railway Board, the best innovation carries a cash award of ₹1.50 lakhs. From Southern Railway workshops, the GR workshop had participated in the above scheme for the year 2019-20. Due to Covid-19, assessment and declaration of results were delayed, and the results announced now.
The system developed was to collect data from energy meters and upload them to Cloud and generate consolidated reports for critical analysis of energy consumption pattern. Since the system is fetching energy consumption data every second, it has become a handy tool for energy planning and identification of high consumption machines, utilisation pattern and idle running of machines, thus identifying and monitoring energy systems easier.
The system's advantage includes total elimination of dependency on suppliers for the software and customisation since software is in house developed and reduction in the cost of project since it was developed and installed at a meagre expenditure of ₹25,000, says a release from Southern Railway.