Track Management Method Based on In-Service Vehicle Vibration Measurements

It is becoming increasingly difficult for regional railways in Japan to carry out adequate track management due to a lack of manpower and a deteriorating business environment.In response to these problems, a system has been developed to monitor track conditions by installing a sensing device on in-service trains and measuring car body vibration.However, the acceleration measured on the car body is affected by the condition of the track as well as the running speed, making it difficult to determine the threshold required for track management.This paper proposes a method for automatically calculating threshold values for determining outliers by setting a significance level using a chi-square distribution for the measured car body acceleration.The proposed method is applied to actual measured acceleration on a regional railway in Japan, and the results show that the proposed method is effective for practical use.