The largest rail operator in Australia, Aurizon, has picked Californian software company Navis to provide its rail operations system. The cloud-based software will be used to support Aurizon’s freight subsidiary Bulk East corporate planning process. Navis will also deliver integrated modules to support Aurizon’s locomotive, and crew shift and roster planning functions to improve planning and asset efficiencies.

The Navis Rail Operations System provides specialised algorithmic and quantitative analysis tools to quickly build and test service design scenarios, including locomotive and crew planning. The platform also employs an integrated model of resources so that changes to the locomotive deployment plans or network details will be available for crew schedule and roster optimisation and vice versa.

Previous implementations of the Navis Rail software have uncovered substantial savings in locomotives, wagons, and crews. According to Tom Forbes, the Head of Navis Rail, “Railways not only need the quantitative tools for optimising asset utilisation; they also need to develop plans and perform ‘what-if’ analysis with a finite amount of staffing. Systems such as Navis Rail help to preserve the institutional knowledge of a rail organisation, which is endangered in the current business environment.”

Forbes also said that the supply chain issues that are stressing many businesses globally need new tools to keep up with rapid-fire changes in customer’s requirements. “The use of optimisation to analyse changes in demand volumes and to quickly test new service design variations are absolutely necessary in today’s transportation environment.” Navis Rail has been working with Aurizon for several years on other projects.