Fuzzy Integral Based Multi-Sensor Fusion for Arc Detection in the Pantograph-Catenary System

The pantograph-catenary subsystem is a fundamental component of a railway train since it provides the traction electrical power. A bad operating condition or, even worse, a failure can disrupt the railway traffic creating economic damages and, in some cases, serious accidents. Therefore, the correct operation of such subsystems should be ensured in order to have an economically efficient, reliable and safe transportation system. In this study, a new arc detection method was proposed and is based on features from the current and voltage signals collected by the pantograph. A tool named mathematical morphology is applied to voltage and current signals to emphasize the effect of the arc, before applying the fast Fourier transform to obtain the power spectrum. Afterwards, three support vector machine-based classifiers are trained separately to detect the arcs, and a fuzzy integral technique is used to synthesize the results obtained by the individual classifiers, therefore implementing a classifier fusion technique. The experimental results show that the proposed approach is effective for the detection of arcs, and the fusion of classifier has a higher detection accuracy than any individual classifier

Advances in fault diagnosis for high-speed railway: A review

The high speed railway (HSR) is a complex system with many subsystems and components. The reliability of its core subsystems is a key consideration in ensuring the safety and operation efficiency of the whole system. As the service time increases, the degradation of these subsystems and components may lead to a range of faults and deteriorate the whole system performance. To ensure the operation safety and to develop reasonable maintenance strategies, fault detection and isolation is an indispensable functionality in high speed railway systems. In this paper, the traction power supply system, bogie system, civil infrastructure system, and control and signaling system of HSR are briefly summarized, and then different fault diagnosis methods for these subsystems are comprehensively reviewed. Finally, some future research topics are discussed

Development of a prognostics and health management system for the railway infrastructure – Review and methodology

The Prognostics and Health Management (PHM) can be considered as a key process to deploy a predictive maintenance program. Since its inception as an engineering discipline, a lot of diagnostics and prognostics algorithms were developed and furthermore methodologies for health management and PHM development established. These solutions were applied in a lot of industrial cases aiming a maintenance transformation. In the Aerospace and Military systems, for example, the PHM has been applied more than 20 years with systems and components applications. During this last decade, the railway industry focused on maintenance issues and expressed a special interest on the PHM systems. The maintenance of the railway infrastructure requires considerable resources and an important budget. Many of the developed algorithms and methodologies can be imported to the Rail Transport systems. However, a methodology to develop a PHM system for a railway infrastructure must be established. This paper provides an overview on the key steps to design a PHM system regarding to the specific characteristics of the railway infrastructure. In addition, tools and procedures for each level of the PHM process are reviewed, as well as a summary of the existing monitoring, health assessment and decision solutions for the railway infrastructure

Railway Engineering: Timetable Planning and Control, Artificial Intelligence and Externalities

This chapter is a case study of the dissemination of railway engineering research in Latin America developed by a railway engineering research group. The leader of the group is a female researcher. The authors aim to inspire to other women researchers in Latin American and Caribbean (LAC) countries who are trying to develop research in IT areas, many times facing serious difficulties, incomprehension, and great challenges. This chapter is divided in set sections like introduction, background, development of railway engineering research. This third section is divided into subsections like timetable planning and trains control, characterization of Panama metro line 1, dwelling times, fuzzy logic, artificial intelligence, social-economics railway externalities, and environmental railway externalities. The fourth section presents the results of the relationship between research activity and teaching of railway engineering obtained in this case study. Finally, the authors present a brief vision about future and emerging regional trends about railway engineering projects.This chapter is a case study of the dissemination of railway engineering research in Latin America developed by a railway engineering research group. The leader of the group is a female researcher. The authors aim to inspire to other women researchers in Latin American and Caribbean (LAC) countries who are trying to develop research in IT areas, many times facing serious difficulties, incomprehension, and great challenges. This chapter is divided in set sections like introduction, background, development of railway engineering research. This third section is divided into subsections like timetable planning and trains control, characterization of Panama metro line 1, dwelling times, fuzzy logic, artificial intelligence, social-economics railway externalities, and environmental railway externalities. The fourth section presents the results of the relationship between research activity and teaching of railway engineering obtained in this case study. Finally, the authors present a brief vision about future and emerging regional trends about railway engineering projects

Power Quality in Electrified Transportation Systems

"Power Quality in Electrified Transportation Systems" has covered interesting horizontal topics over diversified transportation technologies, ranging from railways to electric vehicles and ships. Although the attention is chiefly focused on typical railway issues such as harmonics, resonances and reactive power flow compensation, the integration of electric vehicles plays a significant role. The book is completed by some additional significant contributions, focusing on the interpretation of Power Quality phenomena propagation in railways using the fundamentals of electromagnetic theory and on electric ships in the light of the latest standardization efforts

A new approach based on image processing for detection of wear of guide-rail surface in elevator systems

Elevators ensure transportation of people inside buildings and increase their life quality. High-rise buildings whose number is increasingly going up today has one or more elevator cabs to provide vertical transportation. A great number of people use elevators in many buildings such as business centres, hotels, hospitals and shopping centres daily. It is highly essential for the elevators used by many people daily to operate constantly. In the event of sudden failure of elevators during operation, people inside them face with a tough situation. Also, people have difficulty during the maintenance-repair period of elevators. Elevator system has counterweight system in order to balance the weight of elevator cab. A guide-rail system has been developed to limit the movements of elevator cab and counterweights on horizontal axis. When an elevator system is operational, cab and counterweight system move reversely. The common failures in elevators are usually seen in the components such as elevator guide-rail system, ropes and motors. In this study, a system based on image processing has been developed in order to prevent wear on guide-rail surface in elevators. In the proposed method, real-time condition monitoring is performed by cameras using built-in system. The images of elevator guide-rail surface are captured via four digital cameras fixed onto elevator cab. The image-processing methods are applied on the images captured by cameras and hence the wears on the surface of guide-rails are detected. The surface of guide-rail is firstly detected in the proposed method. Then, image segmentation and mathematical morphology are applied on the image of guide-rail surface and the wears on the surface of rail are detected. The failure extent of the wear failures detected are calculated. By processing the images captured by four cameras during movement of elevator, the results for surface of guide-rails are obtained. Using these results, reporting is performed. An elevator prototype has been created in order to carry out tests for development of the proposed method. The tests have been conducted by fixing the built-in system and cameras onto this elevator prototype. It is considerably advantageous to detect the failures on elevator guide-rails through image-processing methods. Following a literature review, it is seen that the proposed method is a new approach

A literature review of Artificial Intelligence applications in railway systems

Nowadays it is widely accepted that Artificial Intelligence (AI) is significantly influencing a large number of domains, including railways. In this paper, we present a systematic literature review of the current state-of-the-art of AI in railway transport. In particular, we analysed and discussed papers from a holistic railway perspective, covering sub-domains such as maintenance and inspection, planning and management, safety and security, autonomous driving and control, revenue management, transport policy, and passenger mobility. This review makes an initial step towards shaping the role of AI in future railways and provides a summary of the current focuses of AI research connected to rail transport. We reviewed about 139 scientific papers covering the period from 2010 to December 2020. We found that the major research efforts have been put in AI for rail maintenance and inspection, while very limited or no research has been found on AI for rail transport policy and revenue management. The remaining sub-domains received mild to moderate attention. AI applications are promising and tend to act as a game-changer in tackling multiple railway challenges. However, at the moment, AI research in railways is still mostly at its early stages. Future research can be expected towards developing advanced combined AI applications (e.g. with optimization), using AI in decision making, dealing with uncertainty and tackling newly rising cybersecurity challenges

A coupling method for identifying arc faults based on short-observation-window SVDR

This article presents a new method for effective detection of ac series arc fault (AF) (SAF) and extraction of SAF characteristics in residential buildings, which addresses the challenges with conventional current detection methods in discriminating arcing and nonarcing current due to their similarity. Different from the traditional method, in the proposed method, the differential magnetic flux is coupled to obtain high-frequency signals by putting the live line and the neutral line through the current transformer, which can effectively solve the problem of SAF features disappearing in the trunk-line current. However, similar to the traditional method, the effectiveness of the proposed coupling method could also be compromised when being used in cases with dimmer load and load starting process. This is found to be caused by the presence of high-Amplitude pulse phenomenon in the nonarcing signals in these scenarios, which are incorrectly detected as arcing signals in other loads. To address this issue, a short-observation-window singular value decomposition and reconstruction algorithm (SOW-SVDR) is used to enhance the capability to identify SAFs by the coupling method. The proposed method has been implemented and validated according to the UL1699 standard with different types of loads connected to the system and also tested under their starting processes. The experimental results show that the proposed approach is more effective in detecting AFs compared with existing methods

14th Conference on Dynamical Systems Theory and Applications DSTA 2017 ABSTRACTS

From Preface: This is the fourteen time when the conference “Dynamical Systems – Theory and Applications” gathers a numerous group of outstanding scientists and engineers, who deal with widely understood problems of theoretical and applied dynamics. Organization of the conference would not have been possible without a great effort of the staff of the Department of Automation, Biomechanics and Mechatronics. The patronage over the conference has been taken by the Committee of Mechanics of the Polish Academy of Sciences and the Ministry of Science and Higher Education. It is a great pleasure that our invitation has been accepted by so many people, including good colleagues and friends as well as a large group of researchers and scientists, who decided to participate in the conference for the first time. With proud and satisfaction we welcome nearly 250 persons from 38 countries all over the world. They decided to share the results of their research and many years experiences in the discipline of dynamical systems by submitting many very interesting papers. This booklet contains a collection of 375 abstracts, which have gained the acceptance of referees and have been qualified for publication in the conference proceedings [...]