Wayside Railway Switch and Crossing Monitoring Using Isolation Forest Anomaly Scores

Abstract

Railway switch and crossing (S&C) systems have complicated moving structures compared with regular rail. They require multiple components that vary in complexity. The complexity of railway S&C, together with the fact that they are discontinuous points of the system, makes them vulnerable to defects such as squats. A squat on the switching rail could potentially cause rail breakage and lead to catastrophic results, such as derailment. In this study, a method based on anomaly scoring was investigated to estimate the status of an S&C system with respect to squat defects. The proposed method was tested in a real environment under controlled measurement sequences. The results show that the methods can differ between an S&C with squats and another one without them.