Digital transformation and maintenance strategy – Vekoma

 Overview

Company Description

Vekoma Rides, designs, manufactures and builds new and innovative rides worldwide. Every single day our 300+ specialists work with unprecedented energy to move the boundaries of ride experiences to new heights. Vekoma Rides contributes to the success of Amusement and Theme Parks around the world delivering a real experience. Every year millions of people across the globe are delighted, thrilled and profoundly moved by coasters and attractions that bear the exceptional Vekoma brand, the world’s leading roller coaster enterprise. We have the world’s largest in-house expertise centrum, so no challenge is too big or too difficult for us to handle.

Vekoma Rides Parts & Services BV main objective is to support the park’s maintenance staff and operators, in such a way to ensure that the Vekoma attractions will operate in a reliable and above all safe manner. For assistance in maintenance, training, advisory, troubleshooting or relocations we are at your service.

Project Description

Currently most of our products are sold to our clients without a service contract. Therefore we have limited information about the degradation of our parts over time. Maintenance intervals are time and/or cycle based and have developed over time to be absolutely safe and reliable. To improve the maintainability and reduce maintenance cost we like evolve to a more modern approach based on gathered data and experience.

Vekoma Rides Parts & Services is currently running a project for digital transformation to integrate a support platform for our clients. This platform includes live connection to manuals, product databases and maintenance tasks.

Within the project we are looking for a possibility on how additional (maintenance) data can be gathered, stored and evaluated. This data can be used for (predictive) maintenance and product improvement to increase uptime and detecting problems on forehand.

Can you help us to define what would be the best approach for Vekoma, and how it can be realized?

Goals of the Project

The goal of the internship is to determine how several data types for Vekoma can be stored, processed and combined in such a way that it is available for us to use to improve the services and uptime of our products.

Deliverables

Final deliverables will be determined in consultation with the student.

Essential Student Knowledge

Where in the past our trains used to be purely mechanical systems, today we have a mechatronic design that uses sophisticated electronics on board.
The transition was established for both entertainment reason (e.g. onboard light/audio) as well as safety reason (e.g. sensors, PLC’s and drive systems). This transition creates opportunities to gather much more additional useful data than we currently do. The data can be useful for predictive maintenance as well as trouble shooting.
For determining how data can be logged/linked/analyzed, knowhow about measuring systems, datalogging and communication would be handy.

More information: escf@tue.nl