15
Mar 2018
Intelligent Computer Vision Agents Optimising PTI Safety and Train Dwell Times
Digital Rail have worked with Lancaster University on a project under which our intelligent computer vision system is optimising safety and vehicle dwell times. The project is based upon patented technology developed at Lancaster University. Years of research by Professor Plamen Angelov and Dr Gruff Morris have allowed the intelligent vision system to be computationally efficient to reduce data dimensionality in detecting both static and moving...
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21
Feb 2018Upcoming Conferences
7th European Transport Research Arena Between 16-19th April 2018 Digital Rail will be presenting a Poster on ‘Opportunities for resilient rail system development using natural language processing’ at the 7th European Transport Research Arena Conference in Vienna. The Transport Research Arena 2018 will include a wide spectrum of research and innovation activities spanning basic research to application-oriented engineering, social, technical and economic aspects as well...
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05
Feb 2018Reducing the Carbon Toll of Railway
Digital Rail are working on a project that seeks to use advanced Natural Language Processing (NLP) to identify non-compliance against railway standards during the development of railway system. Non-compliance will cause a lack of resilience which will be linked to likely train service delays and the associated carbon toll. The toll is caused by having to lay on additional rail services, buses, maintenance, and so...
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10
Nov 2017Shedding Light on Wheel Slides
When train and tram wheels brake unevenly the result is often wheel flats. Resulting wheel slides cost the industry millions of pounds in engineering costs and delays each year. UK Railway Group Standard GM/RT2466 requires that wheel flats larger than 60mm on vehicles operating at speeds up to and including 200km/h (125mph) have to be returned to depots immediately – at greatly reduced speeds. For 40-60mm flats, a vehicle has to be returned to...
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25
Sep 2017Working it out in Logs
Railway safety management is a complex subject that involves a significant amount of manual intervention in the assessment, analysis and control of risk. Supporting documentation is, usually, worked on by multiple parties, with differences in system viewpoints and writing styles. Maintaining quality safety documentation is therefore an interesting challenge for the industry. Hazard logs, for example, play a central role in both system engineering and risk...
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14
Sep 2017Shedding Light on Train Delays
Train Delays amongst Britain’s trains cost the rail industry over £100 million a year. However, the additional cost to the economy in lost time is over £1 billion [1]. On-time performance is directly impacted by a multitude of events including train reliability, poor track quality, and operation under degraded conditions. To better understand what constitutes the major contributions to delays, the rail industry has embarked on...
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08
Sep 2017Hornby BIG DATA Project
Overall Purpose of the Role: There is a big push to make railways more effective and increase capacity. The main opportunity is to run trains closer together and autonomously. We are building a model railway that can be used to explore possibilities for this. The main theme will be to use an existing model railway set-up that already has digital control. See the set up...
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10
Jun 2016Will a data driven approach replace RAMS and conventional safety engineering?
If one looks through the railway safety and reliability standards, EN50126 / EN51028/9 https://www.linkedin.com/groups/4985242 and the recommended activity at each life-cycle stage it will be seen that nearly all the items are data driven. Using Big Data and Machine Learning we could eliminate a lot of the work done now by safety engineers. Of course you would have to follow a more formal system engineering...
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