PhD Research Proposal

(Doctoral Program in Railways Systems)

Railway Vehicle and

Infrastructure Health Monitoring

Program Candidate

Muhammad Jaleel
[email protected]

Department of Civil Engineering

United Kingdom

Submission date
January 27, 2019
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 Table of Contents

1. Introduction: ................................................................................................................................3

2. Research Aims and Objectives................................................................................................4

3. Literature Review: .......................................................................................................................5

4. Research methodology............................................................................................................. 7

5. Discussion .....................................................................................................................................8

6. Conclusion....................................................................................................................................9

7. References ....................................................................................................................................9

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1. Introduction:

1.1. Railway industry has always played a significant role in transportation as well

as transit systems that have been attributed to what we call the increasing

demand to cater both freight as well as passengers. Due to lots of challenges,

however, faced by railway such as traffic flow, harsh environments, security

and safety risks, adaptive and new systems which deploy new technology are

highly recommended. The railway industry’s future is known to depend on the

systems of smart transportation which leverage various technologies on the

network infrastructure of rail in order to reduce the cost of its life-cycle. There

are many new services, such as asset management, integrated security as well

as predictive maintenance that are seemed to improve and have great impact

on decision-making process of different issues such as scheduling, safety as

well as system capacity.

1.2. A combination of interconnected components and technological solution is

represented by Smart railways and transportation infrastructure such as

automatic digital displays, ticketing systems and smart meters (Wong,

2004)Structural Health Monitoring (SHM) systems, historically, had been

designed in order to use sensor networks; however, the low installation efforts

and high reliability as well as maintenance costs of these sensor networks

made them able to be emerged as an alternate platform that would be

compelling. Because of the cost of high installation, these smart sensor

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 networks are considered to be generally feasible to SHM applications which

are long term and where the health of structure is a matter of greater

significance. When it comes to the cost reduction with regard to using WSNs,

it would play its role in enabling SHM to be utilized in significant private as

well as public infrastructure and also increase the applications’ usage such as

structural monitoring that is short term. Such kind of systems can play their

role in extending the numerous structures’ life span by enabling damage

detection; they also eliminate the routine inspections’ cost and, most

importantly, improve what we call public safety (Wong, 2007).

2. Research Aims and Objectives

2.1. The research aims to offer the main railway scenarios’ introduction by making

examination of architecture and technologies such as smart sensors that are

being utilized nowadays.

2.2. The research aims to review the services as well as requirements related to

basic railway which have been provided by GSM-R.

2.3. The research will examine the factors which have greatly influenced the LTE’s

development, and what is considered to be prerequisite in order to comply

with the railway services’ specific requirements.

2.4. For railway environment, there are many benefits that can be taken for

communication and earlier detection of damage through the use of smart

sensory, so the research aims to explain the benefits of it in details.

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 2.5. The research will also explain and describe the rise of the use of technological

devices as well as Internet of Trains’ paradigm. Furthermore, the main

developments with reference to technology will also be described that how

smart sensors can have a great impact on the infrastructure health monitoring.

2.6. The research will also review the main short as well as medium-term smart

sensors to the smart railways.

2.7. Finally, the research will help address all the questions that have been asked in

this research.

3. Literature Review:

3.1. As far as SHM is concerned, it is considered to be a way of how to capture the

condition as well as changes in the structure’s condition by evaluating the

data that has been collected. The SHM’s objectives include: (i) monitoring of

the civil infrastructures’ health; (ii) quantifying the damage’s severity; (iii)

increasing the ability of service; (iv) offering the reducing cost’s possibility of

maintenance as well as inspection; (v) predicting the serviceable life which is

remaining (Spencer et al. 2007; Rytter(1993). Already present SHM systems are

categorized into different wired sensor networks, which is actually falls into the

traditional approach as well as smart sensor networks that are wireless. In the

SHM’s early stage, wired sensors have been most frequently used. Some

classical instances of these systems include all the work that has been done by

Abdel-Ghaffar et al. (1985), Celebi (2006), Caicedo et al. (2002), Wong (2004),

Ni et al. (2010), Wong (2007), as well as Fujino et al. (2000). The applications
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varied in the systems’ purpose, the networks size, different type so sensor

installed, duration of monitoring, and the bridges’ ages when it got

instrumented. For instance, SHM system was installed by Abdel-Ghaffar et al.

(1985) in San Francisco on “The Golden Gate Bridge”, in order to analyze the

response of bridge under vibration. This experiment had included twenty eight

accelerometers (eighteen when it comes to the main span and ten were

installed on one of these two towers) as well as an anemometer. A monitoring

system that is real-time seismic was got implemented on the “Bill Emerson

Memorial Bridge” in Missouri (Caicedo et al. 2002). Such instrumentation was

consisted of eighty four accelerometers as well as anemometers, in addition to

this, data was collected through internet. Also, in Hong Kong on “Tsing Ma

Bridge” (Wong 2004) was instrumented along with more than six hundred

sensors. Although the earlier implementations’ contributions were considered

to be remarkable in order to advance SHM, SHM’s wide spread use was not

available. The wired SHM system’ main challenge is that the system’s cost

increases as the network’s size increases. Despite the sensors’ lowered cost

long with the “micro-electro-mechanical system (MEMS)” recent development,

the installation’s cost always remained high because of the network ‘cabling.

In UK, Incrementing sixty three sensors on the “Humber Bridge” needed thirty

two kilometer of cabling (Brown john, 2007). MEMS technology’ advances,

along with the radio systems’ prevalence, have opened up the (wireless)

sensing applications’ possibility in SHM. Due to the fact that structural damage

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 is considered to be the local phenomenon, the sensor systems’ dense array is

desirable in order to facilitate and effective as well as powerful damage

detection. Realizing these systems, however, along with traditional sensor

systems (Wired) is not only considered to be very expensive but it is also

considered to be very time consuming, because of its cabling work that is

highly necessary in order to connect all of the smart sensors to main base

station. Along with that, in such systems the network topologies are what we

call intrinsically centralized as well as lack flexibility; therefore, the systems are

seemed to be suffered from what can be known as data inundation. Hence,

steady developments over the decades have made to (wireless) smart sensors’

each component to commercial as well as academic uses. The basic features

which have comprised a smart sensor (wireless) are a processor, radio,

memory as well as sensing power and interface. A radio makes the wireless

sensors able in order to communicate within the system network as well as

data is transferred wirelessly. A wireless sensors’ majority operate on 900mhz,

or 5ghz when it comes to radio frequencies (Rice, 2009).

4. Research methodology

4.1. As far as research methodology is concerned, it would be both qualitative as

well as quantitative since different sensory approaches would be analyzed,

systems detection would be taken into consideration in order to know that

how much effective they can be for railway vehicles and for the health

monitoring.
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5. Discussion

5.1. When it comes to Railway lines, they are categorized into 1 of these 4 classes:

urban, inter-city, intra-city as well as high-speed. It is highly important to

separately examine the lines as well as networks; by keeping in view this it can

be argued that all these differences of them can greatly affect the

requirements of them. Furthermore, the communication systems of railway

can also be divided into the main 3 application groups: safety as well as

control, operator along with networks that are customer oriented. The

communications systems of railway in this section are described:

communication from train to infrastructure, inter-car communications as well

as intra-car communications, inside the station communication,

communication of infrastructure to infrastructure.

5.2. A radio’s careful choice is highly needed, due to the energy cost that can

greatly be dominated by the power that is consumed amid data’s

communication as well as transmission (Pottie and Kaiser, 2000). A wireless

sensor’ processor offers all the functions’ computation and therefore makes

these sensors that are wireless “smart”. A processor’s speed is greatly defined

by a clock’s speed that is embedded in the wireless sensor. RAM as well as

ROM governs the capability of Data Storage. Although the sensor that has a

very large storage space as well as the faster processor is highly required. And

when it comes to power requirement, it should be considered and these smart

sensors greatly play their role in the monitoring the health of infrastructure.

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6. Conclusion

6.1. Many attempts have been made in order to verify the Wireless smart sensor’

application on the civil infrastructures’ full time monitoring, but it can be

denied that this thing has not been achieved so far and needs to be

accomplish as a full-fledged and complete SHM system (Nagayama and

Spencer, 2007). Many Difficulties are faced in establishing a full scale and

complete SHM systems which occur because of the wireless networks’ nature

that includes: error in time synchronization, unreliable and ineffective

communication within the network in Railway, loss of data, as well as very few

network resources such as memory and battery power which limits progress in

this regard.

7. References

7.1. Abdel-Ghaffar, A.M. and Scanlan, R.H., (1985), "Ambient vibration studies of

golden gate bridge: I. suspended structure”, Journal of Engineering

Mechanics, 111(4), 463- 482.

7.2. Brownjohn, J. M. W., (2007), “Structural health monitoring of civil

infrastructure. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A: Mathematical,

Physical and Engineering Sciences”, 365, 589-622.

7.3. Caicedo, J. M., Clayton, E., Dyke, S. J., Abe, M. and Tokyo, J., (2002), “Structural

health monitoring for large structures using ambient vibrations”, Proc. of the

ICANCEER Conference, Hong Kong, August, 15-20.

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7.4. Celebi, M. and EERI, M., (2006), “Real-time seismic monitoring of the new cape

girardeau bridge and preliminary analyses of recorded data: An overview”,

Earthquake Spectra, 22, 609.

7.5. Fujino, Y., Murata, M., Okano, S. and Takeguchi, M., (2000), "Monitoring

system of the Akashi Kaikyo Bridge and displacement measurement using

GPS", Proc. of SPIE, nondestructive evaluation of highways, utilities and

pipelines IV, 229–236.

7.6. Nagayama, S. H. Sim, Y. Miyamori, and B. F. Spencer Jr., Issues in Structural

Health Monitoring Employing Smart Sensors, Smart Structures and Systems, 3,

3 (2007). 299-320.

7.7. Nagayama, T. and Spencer, B., F, Jr. (2007), Structural Health Monitoring Using

Smart Sensors, Newmark Structural Engineering Laboratory. University of

Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

7.8. Pottie, G. J. and Kaiser, W. J., (2000), “Wireless integrated network sensors”,

Magazine Communications of the ACM CACM Homepage archive, Vol. 43,

Issue 5, Pages 51- 58.

7.9. Rice, J.A. and Spencer Jr., B.F., (2009), “Flexible smart sensor framework for

autonomous full-scale structural health monitoring”, NSEL Report Series 018,

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

7.10. Rytter, A., (1993), “Vibration based inspection of civil engineering structures”,

Ph.D. Dissertation, Department of Building Technology and Structural

Engineering, Aalborg University, Denmark.

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7.11. Wong, K.Y., (2004), “Instrumentation and health monitoring of cable-

supported bridges”, Structural Control and Health Monitoring, 11(2), 91-124.

7.12. Wong, K.Y., (2007), “Design of a structural health monitoring system for

longspan bridges”, Structure and Infrastructure Engineering, 3,169–185.

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