Degradation Detection Method for Railway Point Machines

Point machines (PMs) are used for switching and locking railway turnouts, and are considered one of the most critical elements of a railway signal system. The failure of the point mechanism directly affects the operation of the railway and may cause serious safety accidents. Hence, there is a need for early detection of the anomalies in PMs. From normal operation to complete failure, the machine usually undergoes a series of degradation states. If the degradation states are detected in time, maintenance can be organized in advance to prevent the malfunction. This paper presents a degradation detection method that can effectively mine and identify the degradation state of the PM. First, power data is processed to obtain the feature set that can describe the PM characteristics effectively. Then, a clustering analysis of the feature set is carried out by self-organizing feature-mapping network, and various degradation states are mined. Finally, the optimized support vector machine is used to build the state classifier to identify the degradation state of the PM. The experimental results obtained with the Siemens S700K PM show that the proposed method could not only mine the effective degradation states, but also obtain high identification accuracy.