Study of a Distributed Wireless Multi-Sensory Train Approach Detection and Warning System for Improving the Safety of Railroad Workers
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2014-07-04
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Abstract:Safety is a key concern for the North American railroad industry, particularly for their employees. However, in one particular area there is an identified urgent need for a novel solution that helps protect them better than the current approach: track worker safety. Railroad employees and contractors are required to work on or near tracks. To prevent accidents, railroad personnel are tasked with acting as lookouts for oncoming trains. This is a tedious task and prone to failure, and statistics by the Federal Railroad Administration (FRA) published in 49 CFR 214 in 2008 indicate that the rate of accidents is in fact increasing! Current commercially available solutions to this problem are infeasible for adequately addressing this need. We have shown this as part of our research reported in this report, and attributed it to two primary factors: the reliance on single-detector approaches which are shown to be unreliable, and the need of most systems for destructive and semi-permanent installation methods to attach these systems to the railroad tracks. Our solution we developed is built around a novel multi-sensory detection approach, where the benefits of each sensing method is leveraged and the drawbacks are resolved. We have shown that our method is highly reliable, with zero missed trains, and also detailed how our system achieves its modularity and ease of installation. We strongly believe that the system we developed for this project can help save lives of railroad track workers and help increase operational efficiency of the railroads as well. We thank MATC and Union Pacific for their support of this research.
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