Plans are in place for Hitachi Rail to acquire the digital rail monitoring business Omnicom from Balfour Beatty. Hitachi Rail says this acquisition marks a key strategic pillar for its new digital asset management business, known as HMAX.
“This is a strategic acquisition for Hitachi Rail,” said Hitachi Rail CEO Giuseppe Marino. “Plugging Omnicom’s pioneering track monitoring tools into our digital asset management platform will further strengthen our global offer to optimize customers’ rail services and the surrounding infrastructure. New technological solutions such as our HMAX platform demonstrate the power of AI to enhance the performance of our railway infrastructure and systems.”
Omnicom's portfolio of software technologies assists with surveying, inspecting and monitoring rail infrastructure assets including its Infrastructure Monitoring System, gauge clearance measurement, line visual inspection and scanning infrastructure. Its monitoring systems can be installed on trains and uses edge computing and machine learning to provide near real-time anomaly detection on rail tracks. The technology collects trillions of bytes of images per day and allows its customers to optimize their trackside maintenance.
Omnicom’s remote monitoring and measurement solutions will feed into Hitachi Rail’s new HMAX suite, allowing for the technology to be offered on the global market. HMAX first launched at InnoTrans in September 2024 and representing as a comprehensive digital asset management solution. Helping to integrate a vast array of live data from the train and the surrounding rail infrastructure into a single platform. The platform uses AI and machine learning to process the data and extract knowledge and apply it to achieve operational and service enhancements including traffic optimization, energy consumption reduction and an on-condition/ predictive maintenance process.
HMAX also enables huge volumes of data to be processed at the ‘edge’ (on the trains or infrastructure) in real-time, with only relevant information sent back to the operational control centers. This enables an unprecedented improvement in the speed that actionable insights reach transport operators, as previously it could take days for data to be processed in maintenance locations.
“This acquisition strengthens Omnicom’s ability to collaborate, innovate and deliver AI-enabled systems and services whilst further enhancing the safety, efficiency and reliability of rail infrastructure, building on our proven data-driven solutions which help predict and prevent railway asset failures,” said Omnicom Managing Director Sanjay Razdan. “I look forward to Omnicom’s continuing success as part of the Hitachi brand”.
