Demonstration of Smart Railway Level Crossing Design and Validation Using Data from Metro Rail, South Africa

Abstract

Long waiting time at railway level crossings poses a risk on the safety and affects capacity of rail and road traffic. However, in most cases, the long closing time can be prevented by reducing the time lost at a railway level crossing. The emphasis of this study is to present a numerical optimisation algorithm to reduce the time lost per train trip at a railway level crossing. Thus, attributes with the highest impact on the railway level crossing closing time were extracted from the data analysis of rail-road level crossings on the southern corridor of the Western Cape metro rail. Powell’s optimisation algorithm was formulated on the minimisation of the time lost at the railway level crossing per trip. Thus, time lost is constrained by the technical and train’s traction constraints. The upper and lower bounds of Powell’s algorithm were defined by the threshold closing time in addition to the actual and expected probability density functions. The algorithm was implemented in Matlab. Furthermore, the algorithm was trained on 8000 data sets and tested on 2000 data sets. The developed algorithm proved to be effective and robust in comparison to the current state of railway level crossings under study. Thus, the algorithm was validated to reduce the time lost at the railway level crossing by at least 50%.