Citation:
Omer F. Eker, Fatih Camci, Adem Guclu, Halis Yilboga, Mehmet Sevkli, Saim Baskan, A simple state-based prognostic model for railway turnout systems, IEEE Transactions on Industrial Electronics, Volume 58, Issue 5, 2011, Pages 1718 - 1726.
Abstract:
The importance of railway transportation has been increasing in the world.
Considering the current and future estimates of high cargo and passenger
transportation volume in railways, prevention or reduction of delays due to any
failure is becoming ever more crucial. Railway turnout systems are one of the
most critical pieces of equipment in railway infrastructure. When incipient
failures occur, they mostly progress slowly from the fault free to the failure
state. Although studies focusing on the identification of possible failures in
railway turnout systems exist in the literature, neither the detection nor
forecasting of failure progression has been reported. This paper presents a
simple state-based prognostic method that aims to detect and forecast failure
progression in electro-mechanical systems. The method is compared with Hidden
Markov Model based methods on real data collected from a railway turnout system.
Obtaining statistically sufficient failure progression samples is difficult
considering that the natural progression of failures in electro-mechanical
systems may take years. In addition, validating the classification model is
difficult when the degradation is not observable. Data collection and model
validation strategies for failure progression are also presented.