Condition Monitoring of Railway Tracks from Car-Body Vibration Using a Machine Learning Technique

A track condition monitoring system that uses a compact on-board sensing device has been developed and applied for track condition monitoring of regional railway lines in Japan. Monitoring examples show that the system is effective for regional railway operators. A classifier for track faults has been developed to detect track fault automatically. Simulation studies using SIMPACK and field tests were carried out to detect and isolate the track faults from car-body vibration. The results show that the feature of track faults is extracted from car-body vibration and classified from proposed feature space using machine learning techniques.