Hybrid fault diagnosis of railway switches based on the segmentation of monitoring curves

Abstract

Switches are one of the most important pieces of infrastructure in railway signal systems, and they significantly influence the efficiency and safety of train operation. Currently, the identification of switch failures mainly depends on the experience of railway staff and the use of simple thresholding methods. However, these basic methods are highly inaccurate and frequently result in false and missing alarms. This paper aims to develop a hybrid fault diagnosis (HFD) method for railway switches. The method is an intelligent diagnosis method that uses massive current curves collected by microcomputer monitoring systems. We first divide the switch operation current curves into three segments based on the three mechanical processes that occur during switch operation. Then, a standard curve is selected from the fault-free curves, and common typical faults are ascertained through a microcomputer monitoring system. Finally, derivative dynamic time warping and a quartile scheme are employed to identify fault curves. An experiment based on current curves collected from the Guangzhou Railway Bureau in China demonstrates that the HFD method is extremely accurate and has low false and missing alarm rates. HFD performs better than the studied support vector machine (SVM) and dynamic time warping (DTW) methods, which are widely used for fault diagnosis.