The IDex Case Study on the Safety Measures of AIoT-based Railway Infrastructures

Railway safety is a tremendously essential aspect of urban management. The railway network is a highly sophisticated infrastructure comprising numerous devices, machines, networks, services, etc. Therefore, the Internet-of-things (IoT) and Artificial Intelligence (AI) can be conceived as the crucial technologies for enabling ubiquitous data collection and unmanned decision-making, respectively. The exploitation of AI and IoT (AIoT) will ease the monitoring, fault detection, and decision-making in railway safety measures. Nonetheless, the AIoT may pose some new cyber threats to the railway infrastructure, such as unauthorized data modification and hijacking. An integral evaluation of IoT solutions is thus demanding. The IEEE Standards Working Group (WG) P2668 is developing a universal and objective standard to measure and quantify the maturity of IoT solutions. The IoT maturity index, namely the IDex, will be standardized to provide a comprehensive evaluation for all IoT objects pertinent to their performance and application requirements. The IEEE P2668 has conducted various case studies in different aspects, such as supply chain, mission-critical applications, Smart City development, etc. In this paper, the IDex case study on the AIoT-based railway safety measures will be presented and discussed.