ICTNews - With the desire to contribute to the reduction of railway accidents by IT, in the graduation thesis, a group of FPT students proposed a plan to build a sensor system to help identify trains, automatically turn on warning devices. at the intersection between the railways and the residential roads.

 

Model of FPT University student group to illustrate how the system is designed by ourselves.

 

Embarking on implementing a graduation thesis on sensor systems to help identify trains, 4 FPT University students including Phan Thanh Loc, Phan Huu Tai, Vu Thanh Hai, and Hoang Phi Hong have examined carefully about how to alert the trains arriving at the intersection.

This group of students also said that they often visited the train stations to observe, make objective judgments and from there analyse to find a solution for their problem. The group discerned that pulling the horn, turning on the signal and lowering the barricade was done manually, so it was inevitable to depend on subjective reasons coming from the guards, such as mood, health status, concentration when on duty ...

Many options were suggested and many sensors had also been "hunted down" to reach the best solution. After several days of research, the team decided to use a magnetic sensor to put on the train and two magnet blocks on the railway, and built an application to process information which is sent to the station by RF module when the sensor go through the magnet block installed 400m away from the guard station. The team performs the evaluation project, if there is a system that automatically operates these operations, the possibility of collisions leading to railway accidents will be reduced. "The railroad accident on Ghenh bridge (Bien Hoa city), causing 24 casualties due to the lack of concentration of the guard haunted us. It urged us to perform well on this topic, ”said Phi Hong.

“In addition to the 400m magnet block, the system has another block 200m away from the station. The sensor will detect these two magnets to calculate the average velocity value, from which the system will know the time the train arrives at the intersection and display on the countdown timer for traffic participants to note. When it reaches a certain time, maybe 30 - 40 seconds or more depending on the traffic safety and practical requirements in each area, the signal light will automatically turn red, and the barrier will also be lowered down to prevent vehicles from entering the railroad, ”said Phi Hong, explaining how the system works.

Also from the measured velocity value, the system will calculate the time the train leaves the intersection to lift the barrier and turn off the warning lights.

The graduated topic on a train identification system of FPT University students was assessed by the members of the council well in terms of academic ability and high applicability.

In the process of understanding the causes of accidents, the students realized that if the guards could quickly inform the driver of the accident, the damage would be limited. From there, an emergency button is set up on the application for the guards to use when they need to alert the train driver.

In order to ensure that the warning system is working properly, the railway staff only needs to check the status of sensors, magnets and warning devices regularly every day to promptly remedy any damage.

The system also shows the optimality and cost-saving feature when it does not require changing the status or design of trains and rails. At the same time, information from the transmission system is accurate because the sensor has low noise, rarely affected by weather conditions and traffic density. All information about train speed and time will also be saved, which can be used to analyze the cause of an accident.

This graduation topic of FPT students has been highly appreciated by the Council of the Graduation Project in terms of both technology and feasibility.

Sharing about the next step, the group representative said in addition to improving the emergency button that allows sending images of incidents at the intersection, the group hopes to have the opportunity to put the system into practice, contribute to reducing the number of current railway accidents.

According to ICT