A Conceptual Model-based Digital Twin Platform for Holistic Large-scale Railway Infrastructure Systems

Abstract

Railway is crucial for a sustainable transportation system. Digitization of the railway infrastructure system has a proven impact on improving its resilience and efficiency while reducing the overall cost. The increased digitization of railway infrastructure systems provides a solid basis for the realization of a digital twin (DT), which can continuously merge different sources of data and diverse models for monitoring, diagnostics, and prognostics to optimize railway performance. However, the railway infrastructure system is sophisticated and consists of a series of subsystems, including turnouts, tunnels, vehicles, etc. Current researches mainly focus on the DT application of the single subsystem, but the comprehensive communication and interactions between diverse railway infrastructure subsystems remain a largely under-explored domain. Aiming to fill the gap, this research introduces a conceptual architecture to develop a DT platform to seamlessly integrate and automatically link digital models and data of different subsystems into a holistic large-scale railway infrastructure system. The model cooperation frameworks, communication approaches and visualization toolbox are presented in this work. One typical use case of the platform will also be implemented and discussed. ft is expected that this research will shed new light on the sustainable development of the holistic large-scale railway infrastructure system.