RailCheck: Functional Safety for Wireless Condition Monitoring of Railway Turnouts and Level Crossings

Increasing demands for more cost-effective, reliable and safer railway infrastructure unavoidably bring up the need for transitioning from current preventive maintenance strategies to more efficient, predictive, condition-based maintenance models. Such a change requires large installations of sensors that continuously monitor key infrastructure and aggregate captured data for post-processing in the cloud. Due to the amount of assets to be supervised, novel approaches must be studied in order to find a viable solution that is deployable on this scale. Continuous surveillance is then a desired goal, as it is closely associated with big-data analytics and allows to predict upcoming issues and react to unexpected events. Infrastructure managers will gain much better overview as a result of large amount of highly representative data set-in-context; moreover, they will benefit from having supportive algorithms simplifying their determinations. This paper describes the safety-related measures performed on one such system; eventually intended to replace the routine inspections currently being carried out on railway points and level crossings.