Professor Babakalli Alkali, from the School of Computing, Engineering and Built Environment, will deliver his inaugural professorial lecture on Tuesday, March 2.

The lecture, entitled The Future of Sustainable Railway: A Tale of Two RCM Analytic Approaches?, will explore how the application of remote condition monitoring is used for data collection of critical systems on trains, and how a reliability centred maintenance approach can be used to analyse failures in order to improve the performance and safety of trains.

Professor Alkali will use these analytic approaches to look at the importance of data in deciding what type of maintenance policy should be implemented on railways before trying to determine how it should be done efficiently. He will also outline the benefits of analytics towards sustainable performance and costs associated with disruptions and cancellations of service operations in the industry.

He said: “The professorial lecture will be appealing to professional and practitioners interested in failure analysis and industrial digitalisation where raw data can be transformed into valuable information. This approach will appeal specifically to the railway industry.”

Professor Alkali is the Head of Department for Mechanical Engineering at GCU. He has led several knowledge-transfer partnerships within his school, including with First ScotRail.