Expert system based fault diagnosis for railway point machines

To meet the increasing demands for availability at reasonable cost, operators and maintainers of railway point machines are constantly looking for innovative techniques for switch condition monitoring and prediction. This includes automated fault root cause diagnosis based on measurement data (such as motor current curves) and other information. However, large, comprehensive sets of labeled data suitable for standard machine learning are not yet available. Existing data-driven approaches focus only on the differentiation of a few major fault categories at the level of the measurement data (i.e., the “fault symptoms”). There is great potential in hybrid models that use expert knowledge in combination with multiple sources of information to automatically identify failure causes at a much more detailed level. This paper discusses a Bayesian network diagnostic model for determining the root causes of faults in point machines, based on expert knowledge and few labeled data examples from the Netherlands. Human-interpretable current curve features and other information sources (e.g., past maintenance actions) are used as evidence. The result of the model is a ranking of the most likely failure causes with associated probabilities in terms of fuzzy multi-label classification, which is directly aimed at providing decision support to maintenance engineers. The validity and limitations of the model are demonstrated by a scenario-based evaluation and a brief analysis using information theoretic measures. The authors present the information sources used, the detailed development process and the analysis methodology. This article is intended to be a guide to developing similar models for various complex technical assets.

• Record URL:
  • https://doi.org/10.1177/09544097231195656
• Availability:
  • Find a library where document is available. Order URL: http://worldcat.org/issn/09544097
• Supplemental Notes:
  • © IMechE 2023.
• Authors:
  • Reetz, Susanne
  • 0000-0002-5096-6327
  • Neumann, Thorsten
  • 0000-0002-9236-0585
  • Schrijver, Gerrit
  • van den Berg, Arnout
  • Buursma, Douwe
• Publication Date: 2024-2

Language

• English

Media Info

• Media Type: Web
• Features: Appendices; Figures; References; Tables;
• Pagination: pp 214-224
• Serial:
  • Proceedings of the Institution of Mechanical Engineers, Part F: Journal of Rail and Rapid Transit
  • Volume: 238
  • Issue Number: 2
  • Publisher: Sage Publications Limited
  • ISSN: 0954-4097
  • EISSN: 2041-3017
  • Serial URL: http://pif.sagepub.com/content/current

Subject/Index Terms

• TRT Terms: Diagnostic tests; Fault monitoring; Machine learning; Maintenance of way; Railroad switches; Railroads
• Geographic Terms: Netherlands
• Subject Areas: Data and Information Technology; Maintenance and Preservation; Railroads; Vehicles and Equipment;

Filing Info

• Accession Number: 01911506
• Record Type: Publication
• Files: TRIS
• Created Date: Mar 11 2024 3:56PM