MASATS S.A.
The Evolution in Entrance Systems
This article first appeared in the Bus-News magazine, Issue 1 2023.
The Next Generation of Masats Products
After years of supplying electric and pneumatic door systems to the bus, coach and minibus industry as well as access ramps and lifts for PRM, Masats entered the railway sector in 2008 with a new range of doors and access systems. In 2016, Masats launched a new division with products for station infrastructure: PSD platform screen doors and gap fillers for stations.
The company’s purpose is to improve people’s quality of life through better mobility. With this objective in mind, and thanks to its international presence and customer service spirit, Masats is designing more technological products to improve safety, reliability, availability and maintainability all while offering operators and end users added value.
Always prioritising sustainability, Masats has designed a new generation of smaller, lower-weight products to help reduce vehicle fuel consumption and, as a result, generate less end-of-lifecycle waste.
The latest ECU, the Evolution, is a Masats electronic control that has been developed to provide operators with maximum reliability and added value. The ECU is also prepared to obtain information from vehicle operating data in order to report on and optimise maintenance operations. With an artificial intelligence platform that analyses the data, the company can predict breakdowns and take the necessary maintenance measures when appropriate and, thus, increase vehicle availability. It allows maintenance to be planned, which leads to lower lifecycle costs with this move from preventive maintenance to predictive maintenance.
Vehicle accessibility systems are critical for improvements as predictive maintenance can reduce forced vehicle downtimes and optimise maintenance operations.
This predictive maintenance is currently being pilot tested on buses in Madrid, Barcelona and Singapore with very encouraging results. The potential behind this system has been measured based on the analyses carried out to date. In view of the data collected, predictive systems are expected to increase vehicle availability up to 50%, reduce lifecycle costs by 45% (reducing incidents and unwanted vehicle stoppages in addition to preventive maintenance plans), and improve reliability by 150%.
