Health assessment for railway switch systems

Abstract

Because of the heavy workload and high failure rate of railway switch system (RSS), the traditional scheduled maintenance can not meet the actual operation needs of the railway. Therefore condition-based maintenance (CBM) and prognostic and health management(PHM), which have been mature in other fields should be introduced into RSS. Health assessment is of a great concern among all the technologies. This paper presents a novel method which can be utilized on the health status evaluation of RSS. First of all, RSS is briefly introduced and the connotation of PHM for RSS is analyzed. Secondly, health indicators (HIs) are extracted by different time domain features, and the best indicators are selected to establish the degradation model. By using clustering algorithm, the change point of state is detected which can be used as an instruction of advance maintenance. Finally, a ZYJ7 RSS is selected to test and verify the proposed method. Result indicates that the algorithm can be effectively applied to health assessment of RSS.