Railway Accident Avoiding System: A Safety Measure

The focus of the Indian Railways is to increase capacity utilization of existing assets including rolling stock, track infrastructure, traction power and signalling & telecommunications. By running more high speed trains on the existing infrastructure, passengers and freight carrying capacity as well as revenue and profitability can be increased. In order to ensure safety over high speed and high density rail networks of Indian Railways it is the need of the hour to implement Automatic Train Protection (ATP) system such as Train Collision Avoidance System (TCAS). Indian Railways have taken up indigenous development of Train Collision Avoidance System (TCAS) through Research Designs & Standards Organization (RDSO) to prevent dangerous train collisions caused due to human errors or limitations and equipment failures by providing additional layer of enhanced safety in the operations.

1. Railway Accident Avoiding System Vaibhav Anil Wani ( Sinhgad College of Engineering, Pune)

2. INTRODUCTION 1 2 At present railways is one of the most widely used transportation system in the world. Approximately 10,000 billion freight tonne-Kilometres are travelled around the world every year and more than 5 billon passengers travelled per year as per Railway statistic report. But till now railway transportation system are not safe. Many countries railway faces many collisions during travelling in every year as a result happened lot of damages and casualties. But if we add Anti Collision Technology (ACT) in railway then we can prevent any types of collision. It is an innovative technology which can be detect collision object from specific distance of train and avoid collision dynamically and efficiently by using ultrasound and embedded system. The common reason of the train collisions are malfunctioning train signals or lights, failing mechanics, safety gates not in place,crossings that are unprotected, negligence of train conductor and lack of awareness of the people.

3. COMPONENTS Arduino UNO microcontroller Ultrasonic sensor Radar system module Display Unit

4. 1. Arduino UNO microcontroller A Micro controller comprises of an incredible CPU firmly combined with memory, different I/O interfaces, for example, sequential port, parallel port clock or counter, intrude on controller, information procurement interfaces, Analog to Digital converter, Digital to Analog converter, coordinated on to a solitary silicon chip.

5. 2. Ultrasonic sensor An ultrasonic sensor transmits ultrasonic waves into the air and detects reflected waves from an object. There are many applications for ultrasonic sensors, such as in intrusion alarm systems, automatic door openers and backup sensors for automobiles. Accompanied by the rapid development of information processing technology, new fields of application, such as factory automation equipment and car electronics, are increasing and should continue to do so.

6. 3. Radar system module This Arduino Radar Project is implemented with the help of Processing Application. Radar is a long-range object detection system that uses radio waves to establish certain parameters of an object like its range, speed and position. Radar technology is used in aircrafts, missiles, marine, weather predictions and automobiles. Even though the title says Arduino Radar Project, technically the project is based on Sonar technology as I will be using an Ultrasonic Sensor to determine the presence of any object in a particular range.

7. 4. Display unit A  liquid-crystal display  ( LCD ) is a  flat-panel display  or other  electronically modulated optical device  that uses the light-modulating properties of  liquid crystals  combined with  polarizers . Liquid crystals do not emit light directly, instead using a  backlight  or  reflector  to produce images in color or  monochrome . LCDs are available to display arbitrary images (as in a general-purpose computer display) or fixed images with low information content, which can be displayed or hidden.

8. How do it works? All the components of the system are connected with the control unit. The power supply supplies the power to the control unit. The ultrasonic sensors are used to detect the obstacles in the train path. Ultrasonic sensors work on a principle similar to sonar which evaluates distance of a target by interpreting the echoes from ultrasonic sound waves. The module can easily be interfaced to micro controllers where the triggering and measurement can be done using two pins. The sensor transmits an ultrasonic wave and produces an output pulse that corresponds to the time required for the burst echo to return to the sensor. By measuring the echo pulse width, the distance to target can easily be calculated and also detects the obstacles in the path. If any obstacles are found in the path of the train the message will be conveyed to the monitoring unit of the TRAIN.

9. ADVANTAGES Acts automatically to prevent collisions. System can withstand even in harsh environments. Economical and cost effective. Elimination of human error as no inputs are to be fed by the crew.

10. DISADVANTAGES Adequate braking distance at the speed is not available when a dangerous collision - like situation arises suddenly. Failure to brake power of the locomotives.

11. CONCLUSION Indian railway is world’s second largest railway with 7349 stations, 67956 kms of track, 23 million passenger trains and it carries approximately 8.086 billion people annually. Human safety is a major duty of Govt. of India. At level crossings too ACD network provides the Train Approach warning to road users and regulates the train speed automatically if loco ACD receives Gate Open message from gate ACD of a Non-interlocked Manned LC gate.

12. DID YOU KNOW? Trials were conducted at Tandur station, west of Hyderabad in Andhra Pradesh. Two TCAS-equipped locomotives operated a series of test runs, simulating scenarios including head-on collisions, rear-end collisions, and Spads . The trains ran at converging speeds of 200km/h for the head-on tests, and 60km/h for Spad and collision demonstrations.

13. THANK YOU!