IoT Based Railway Track Faults Detection and Localization Using Acoustic Analysis

Abstract

Rail is one of the most energy efficient and economical modes of transportation. Regular railway track health inspection is an essential part of a robust and secure train operation. Delayed investigations and problem discoveries pose a serious risk to the safe functioning of rail transportation. The traditional method of manually examining the rail track using a railway cart is both inefficient and susceptible to mistakes and biasness. It is imperative to automate inspection in order to avert catastrophes and save countless lives, particularly in zones where train accidents are numerous. This research develops an Internet of Things (IoT)-based autonomous railway track fault detection scheme to enhance the existing railway cart system to address the aforementioned issues. In addition to data collection on Pakistani railway lines, this work contributes significantly to railway track fault identification and classification based on acoustic analysis, as well as fault localization. Based on their frequency of occurrences, six types of track faults were first targeted: wheel burnt, loose nuts and bolts, crash sleeper, creep, low joint, and point and crossing. Support vector machines, logistic regression, random forest, extra tree classifier, decision tree classifier, multilayer perceptron and ensemble with hard and soft voting were among the machine learning methods used. The results indicate that acoustic data can successfully assist in discriminating track defects and localizing these defects in real time. The results show that MLP achieved the best results, with an accuracy of 98.4 percent.