We have developed and are now using a facility maintenance system for railways that has the function of ledger management and automatic drawing. Although we have proposed to use portable terminals for this system as a means to collect inspection data, they are not used as expected due to the difficulties of operation and carrying. Therefore, we studied the possibility to use i-mode cellular phones in place of the existing portable terminals for the facility maintenance system. This paper discusses the advantages and disadvantages of i-mode cellular phone, proposes to use it for data collection and reports trial development.

Copyright (c) 2001 Railway Technical Research Institute