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Creating rules in the Railgenius Rule Engine

How to create rules in the Railgenius Rule Engine to receive telematics alerts

Updated over a week ago

Until the first release in 2022, you could still find a predefined set of telematics alerts (battery alert, high coolant temperature, etc.) in the "Notification rules" module.

We have migrated these telematics alerts to the powerful Railgenius Rule Engine.

If you had one or more telematics alerts in the notification rules, you will still see them listed in the notification rules but in read-only mode.

If you do not have admin rights, contact a Railnova administrator within your company. Your admin will create or change the desired telematics alerts for you.

Creating a telematics alert in the Railgenius Rule Engine

If you want to create or modify an alert, you will now be able to do so in the Railgenius Rule Engine.

Click on "Add rule" on the top-right of your screen to open the alert creation page and start by giving a name to your rule.

Check the "Active" box to ensure your rule will start sending alerts when you save it.

As with the maintenance notifications, you can select specific assets for which you want to receive alerts, or if you leave it empty, you'll receive alerts for all your assets.

You can then define what triggers the alert and what closes it. Choose one of the options from the drop-down menu and the parameters "is_open", "equal", and "Yes" to open the alert, "No" to close it.

Important note: The message type must exist for the asset(s) you want to create the rule for (high_temp_coolant, merged, telematic,...), otherwise, the rule won't trigger any alerts.

If you're unsure if the message type is available for the chosen asset/asset type, please go to the "Telematics data" module, select the asset, and check under "message type" which message types are available.

You can then choose a priority, modify the open alert name, add a help URL and a description and check if you want to show the alert in the Live Monitoring.

The open alert name includes the rule and asset names by default.

Please note that the live monitoring page and the email subject will show the "Open alert" text.

You can then select which email addresses should receive the alert.

By default, the email contains the following information:

If you wish to receive a second email when the alert closes, please check the "Send notification email when closing" box. Two new fields will open, "close alert" and "close email body".

The close alert name includes "Closed", the rule name and the asset name by default.

Please note that the live monitoring page and the email subject will show the "Close alert" text.

Please check this article if you wish to customise your alert titles and emails.

Once you're done, click on the blue "Save" button at the top-right of the page.

Examples of the most common telematics alerts

Here are some of the available most common telematics alerts and how to set them up in the Railgenius Rule Engine.

Battery level

This alert is divided into two criticality levels:

  • Warning: The battery voltage level is abnormally low for the locomotive, but you have plenty of time to take action and avoid any problems. On average, this means you will have multiple days to plan an action if the battery voltage continues to decrease at this rate.

  • Critical: The battery voltage level is extremely low for the locomotive. On average, this means you only have a few hours to plan an action before the locomotive won't be able to start.

The battery voltage level for both warning and critical alerts is directly inferred from the historical data of the locomotive by statistical and machine learning techniques.

Fuel level

You will be alerted when the fuel level reaches 25% of the whole tank capacity.

Refuel

You will receive an alert when an asset has been refuelled.

High coolant temperature

The "Coolant temperature too high" alert warns you when the temperature of the engine coolant is abnormally high. Currently, we support this alert on the following locomotive classes: G1206, T77 and BB400.

Idle periods

You can be alerted when an asset has its engine switched on but is not moving for a long period of time (60 minutes or 120 minutes).

Any maintainer will tell you that engines are not designed to idle for long periods. On top of that, you can easily reduce the fuel consumption of your fleet by minimising the duration of the periods in which locomotives are idling.

This alert is divided into two time periods and will notify you when one of your locomotives has been continuously idling for the past 60 minutes or 120 minutes.

Locomotive parked on battery

You can be alerted when a locomotive is powered on for more than two hours with the engine switched off, no external power source and no movement during that time. This alert helps you detect that the battery is discharging, and take immediate action to avoid locomotives that won't start.

Inside charging zone and not charging

You can be alerted if your asset is inside a charging zone but hasn't been charging for over an hour.

Being alerted of fault codes

Creating an alert for fault codes

To receive an alert for any triggered fault code, you can select the fault code message type, for instance, "event_mtu_41", "event_emd_display", "event_cat_data_link_3500b",..., then "is_open" and "Yes".

If you would like to filter the conditions further and receive alerts only for specific fault codes, you can click on "Add rule" on the right to add a second line to your condition.

Select the message type from the drop-down menu and add the parameters "code" and "in", then type the code numbers separated by a semicolon (without spaces):

Closing an alert for fault codes

To close the alerts for fault codes, first, check in the "Telematics data" how the fault codes behave in the corresponding message type to select the closing conditions accordingly.

If the fault code opens and closes in the telematics data, which is visible with the green checkmark (fault code opens) and the red cross (fault code closes), you can select the corresponding message type, then "is_open" equals "No". If necessary, you can also specify the fault code numbers:

If the fault code only opens (green checkmark), but there's no closing message (no red cross) set up in the telematics data, leave the closing conditions empty. The alert will trigger as soon as the fault code appears and close immediately.

How to use "is filter"

The purpose of the "is filter" function is not to evaluate messages which do not match the "filtering" rule.

In this example, if you tick "is filter", the rule only considers messages for which "event_mtu_r41.is_open = true", and then whose code is listed in the second condition line.

In this case, any "event_mtu_r41" message whose code is in the list but is closed won't be considered and won't trigger an alert.

Adding recipients to the telematics rules

Please note that a telematics alert is always linked to an asset. The recipient will only receive the email if he can see that asset in our software.

That way, you don't have to create a rule per recipient, partner company or asset. You can create one rule per alert type and add all the contacts with whom you share locomotives, even if they are in different companies and have access to different locomotives. The Rule Engine first checks that the recipient has access to the data of the asset for which the notification is sent to avoid info being sent to the wrong entities.

Rule replay

Once you created your rule, you can test it with Rule replay as described in the following article.

Support

Do you still have questions? Go to the Railnova platform and click "Contact us" for help!

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