Hefei Institutes of Physical Science (HFIPS)-led project has developed a monitoring system to ensure communication and operation safety in railway section by sending early warning using fiber detection technology.

Rail transportation plays an increasingly important role in the busy transportation network in China with the country’s rapid economic development. Railway network is managed by section and section, so is the signal distribution. Therefore, the current communication system can generally tell the section in which the train is, but no one knows the train’s precise position within the section, which may cause severe injuries or even death of especially the construction workers working on the railway track.

To look at this problem, the research team proposed a comprehensive solution with a combination of many technologies.

First, they used distributed detection technology to detect and receive the vibration signal sent from optical fiber that has been laid alongside railway track, which was the raw data. Then the artificial intelligence was used for big data processing since huge amount of the raw data needed a really quick processing. And at last the early warning could be send to each terminal, like computer, APP and acousto-optic alarm etc., that has been networked by cloud platform which also served as the database.

Even though the proposed solution was ideal, the real environment was much more complicated than they could imagine.

In a 30-kilometer railway section that the China Railway Shanghai Group Co., Ltd. opened to the team for real testing, the team has faced many challenges.

In real operation environment, there were lots of interference factors causing problems of signal missing, difficulties in identifying, location and direction determination and so on.

The team has spent two years in lab or alongside the railway track overcoming these challenges one by one.

They used threshold determination to identify the target signal from other interference factors. For precise positioning, the team solved it by map correlation positioning and field calibration and survey.

Finally, in the project reviewing meeting, the team was pleased to receive positive comments from see the reviewing experts which was based on the good result of real environment test.

According to the team, the project has reached its goal in current phase. But, they will not stop by taking more actions to enhance the data processing then to realize a much earlier warning. In addition, the team is also expecting to extend their test railway section to 300 kilometers and upgrade the system to monitor the railway track itself.

Contact:

ZHAO Weiwei
Hefei Institutes of Physical Science (http://english.hf.cas.cn/)
Email: annyzhao@ipp.ac.cn