Development of condition monitoring system for railway facilities using opportunistic communication

Condition based maintenance (CBM) of the railway facilities is expected to reduce the total maintenance labors and costs. Since almost all the railway facilities are arranged along the railway lines, we have developed a condition monitoring system using the opportunistic communication which makes a moving receiver on a train collect automatically the monitoring data of the wireless sensors installed on the railway facilities. Bluetooth low energy (BLE), which is one kind of active RFID was used for communication. We selected connectionless broadcast topology of BLE and succeeded in collecting temperature, heat flow and acceleration data of BLE sensors from the Shinkansen train running at the speed of about 255 km/h. The developed system can be expected as an effective monitoring method for the railway facilities.