HITACHI Rail has agreed a deal with Balfour Beatty to acquire Omnicom, a supplier of digital rail infrastructure monitoring equipment. The transaction is expected to conclude in the second half of 2025. The value was not disclosed.
Omnicom provides software and hardware to support surveying, inspection and monitoring of rail infrastructure assets. This includes its Infrastructure Monitoring System, gauge clearance measurement, visual line inspection, and infrastructure scanning products. Omnicom’s monitoring systems can be installed on trains and use edge computing and machine learning to provide near real-time track infrastructure anomaly detection, enhancing decision-making for maintenance planning along with asset lifecycle.
Hitachi says the remote monitoring and measurement solutions will feed into its HMAX suite, a comprehensive digital asset management solution. HMAX integrates live data from the train and surrounding rail infrastructure into a single platform, using AI and machine learning to process, extract and apply the knowledge gained to achieve operation and service enhancements.
“Plugging Omnicom’s pioneering track monitoring tools into our digital asset management platform will further strengthen our global offer to optimise customers’ rail services and the surrounding infrastructure,” says Hitachi Rail CEO, Giuseppe Marino.
