Fugro Vegetation Control is a powerful tool to measure, monitor and manage trackside vegetation assets from your desktop. This intelligent application captures and automatically classifies lidar and image data to report on areas where vegetation encroaches the track or overhead line equipment (OLE), or where there is imminent risk of danger.
Proactive planning and control
Fugro Vegetation Control provides inspection and risk analysis reporting on vegetation encroachments, enabling your asset managers to increase improve the safety and reliability of your rail network. This remotely accessible system provides robust data that facilitates proactive intervention and year-on-year planning.
Once risks have been validated, assessed and prioritised, trim and mitigation efforts can be planned and placed into a single- or multi-year programme tailored to your resource availability, budget and local regulations. Long term management strategies can be simulated to assess the cost of treatment and deployment, and to optimise work packages.
Digital vegetation inspection
These insights are based on on data acquired via two of our proven lidar survey tools: RILA®, our unique train-mounted track measurement system, and FLI-MAP, our airborne system. FLI-MAP generates a vegetation base model of the rail corridor and its surroundings; frequently updated standard deviations from the base model are then automatically calculated using data collected with RILA®. Combining FLI-MAP and RILA® provides you with wider vegetation insights for near-track immediate risk analysis and long-term maintenance strategy. Eliminating the need for lineside patrols, monitoring and ‘boots on ballast’, this survey method also realises clear health and safety benefits.
Risk analysis and compliance
We provide all our clients with analytics reporting on the proximity of vegetation clusters to the rail network. A digital twin of the track and its surroundings is frequently refreshed to deliver an up-to-date vegetation audit, modelled against in-field assets. This comprehensive assessment of the state of vegetation is based on regulatory standards, proximity rules and risk profiles to provide essential insights for risk management. The system supplies coordinates in the relevant local reference system, and analysis results for every intrusion detected, providing immediate context and relevance for vegetation managers.
You can achieve subsequent savings by moving to less frequent strategic vegetation treatment cycles driven by monitored vegetation growth rates. By mapping and monitoring individual trees, it is possible to treat each tree as an asset with associated parameters including individual growth rates, fall-in risk, health trends, risk as fire fuel, response to treatments, maturity and susceptibility to infestation.