Leading global engineering and consultancy firm Ricardo Rail has developed a management set of software applications to optimise success for rail operations.
Ricardo provides innovative solutions for the design, operation, and safety of railways, ensuring efficient and sustainable transportation networks.
The assurance and specialist engineering services help clients navigate the industry’s operational, commercial and regulatory demands in the rail and mass transit sector.
As Ricardo ANZ manager Jason Ward explains, this includes application toolsets specifically developed for managing the delivery of large portfolios of rail and related assets through delivery and operations and maintenance.
“Large scale multidisciplined complex systems require integration functionality from multiple vendors spanning years of delivery,” he said.
“This presents a significant management challenge for large enterprises. The success of these type of programs depends upon independent agencies with loose cooperation managed via independent contracts, funding, requirements, priorities, and schedules all coming together at the right time and on budget.”
In collaboration with NASA, Ricardo developed a mission-critical Project, Program, and Portfolio (MCP3) management set of software applications for mission and safety-critical programs.
This set of tools used a deep-space mission to Mars as an example to assess confidence in an executable plan that absolutely must respond to potential contingencies where failure is not an option.
Additionally, a deep space mission exposed planning, optimising and executing complexities not typically encountered in project management, such as the “digital noise” of hundreds of thousands of tasks as well as thousands of personnel, equipment, and consumable resources.
“As a result of our extensive global rail experience, Ricardo has recognised that rail infrastructure managers and asset delivery and operations organisations face similar safety and delivery challenges as those identified with NASA,” Ward said.
“As such, our MCP3 platform can be deployed into the rail sector for multi-domain operations team collaboration, including management, engineering, manufacturing, human factors, logistics, safety, and operations to optimise the likelihood of project success.
“The MCP3 toolset employs multiple perspectives to creatively decompose, design, and assess executable work tasks, including task specification, hierarchal work breakdown, process flows, sequence/concurrency plans, schedule, and human/machine interfaces.
“The platform declutters views into the project universe to assist the collaborative team in discovering potential success impediments to be resolved, contingencies to include, and opportunities to be exploited for an optimised and executable plan.”
The MCP3 tools also accommodate differing viewpoints including program, development, system integration, operations and maintenance, and agile improvement sprints by linking any task to multiple dependencies providing insight beyond critical path into cascading effect.
“The Ricardo MCP3 toolset, in addition with our depth of engineering, assurance and operations and maintenance experience and capability, means that Ricardo is best placed to support private and public sector organisations deliver complex single rail projects, or multiple projects in a portfolio, through successful project integration and on-time completion,” Ward said.
Ricardo operates Australian office and workforce locations in New South Wales, Queensland, Victoria, and South Australia.
Some of Ricardo’s large scale rail projects in Australia include multiple stages of Sydney Metro, the New Intercity Fleet rolling stock, the Regional Rail Project, X’trapolis 2.0 rolling stock, QTMP rolling stock, and the Cross River Rail project.
“These projects run the gamut of our service offering of design, operation, independent assurance, and safety,” Ward said.
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