KNOWLEDGE BASED TRAIN NAVIGATION SYSTEM

Abstract

Safe and reliable services is a fundamental requirement of the railway as thousands rely on this service as their prime mode of transportation. The railway accidents accounts to death, injury and a large cost to the government. The most significant contributors of accidents involve track and signaling faults. Traditional railway signaling and control systems have problems such as difficulty in enhancing the capability of railway lines, train delay caused by signal failure, large investment and maintenance, incompatibility and non-interoperability between different systems. In the past several years, GNSS, Communication technologies and GIS have attracted many attentions around the world and these were widely applied in navigation for aviation, ground vehicle and marine application. On the other hand, advanced railway operating systems have been widely used these technologies to guarantee the safety and efficiency of the railway network. The efficiency of these systems is based on the availability of reliable train positioning. According to high navigation performance of GNSS, it is a great choice of train positioning system, since it has such important benefits as lower initial costs and lower maintenance. In this thesis, a new train navigation and control system is proposed which is integration of GNSS, GIS and GSM technologies. With the rapid development of internet, wireless communication, 3G technologies and the formulation and standardization of related protocols, the integration of GNSS, GIS and GSM technologies have been applied in many fields to provide various users with location information on electronic map. The position and speed of train in terms of Latitude, Longitude and speed is obtained by GNSS. To transmit the data obtained data to the central server, GSM/GPRS is used. By this a user can trace a train on GIS ready map using internet. To develop this navigation and control system, first a Location Based Asset Management System (AMS-R) is developed which collects various assets information along with their location information. This information is transmitted to central server using GSM/GPRS network. Further, this location information about assets is utilized into Knowledge Based Train Operator Module and Web Based Train Navigation and Tracking System. Knowledge Based Train Operator Module uses rule based knowledge based approach to take decisions in safety critical situations while approaching to various POI’s. Another important task of this module is providing track maintenance updates to ii loco pilot. While approaching to maintenance segment this module generates warning for loco pilot about speed restrictions. To track real time location of trains over the web a Web Based Train Navigation and Tracking System is developed. This system is a web application which gets location information of trains from central server and displays them on map. The users of this system can be categorized in to three categories administrator, station master and general users which have different roles. Administrator can manage users, trains etc. and track all trains in a single view, station master can track all trains in single view and can change status of signals at last general user can track only one train at a time. Finally, a Trip Navigation and Analysis System is developed to analyze the running performance of train in terms of table and graph. This system can be used for both trains and individual vehicles like car, bus, truck etc. This is an interactive system, when user move cursor over graph, the corresponding location, speed and time information is shown on integrated Google Earth as well as in data panel also.