Network-based safety-related vibration and position analysis for railway vehicles

Nowadays, many considerable efforts are focused on the development of efficient and effective systems that increase the productivity of vehicles by controlling and manipulating the extraordinary states, such as sliding and spinning, during the operational time. Those states play a central role in the performance of the vehicles described as an interaction among different mechanical parts regarding their life-time, their wear and tear, as well as the maintenance costs. In addition, these states ultimately affect the safety of target system and its environment. Therefore, the necessity of avoiding, controlling, or manipulating these states to lower their effects into a tolerable level has become the major driver for conducting the current research work. In this paper, a prototype for safety-related platform for detecting and controlling railway vehicles states by means of vibration capture is presented. Additionally, test procedures in order to collect the vibration data related to each state are presented; these tests were performed under the supervision of an industrial partner. Moreover, the recognized initial patterns of the vibration signals related to the studied states are also introduced.