Application of Advanced Techniques and GIS in Railway Safety Management

Railway industry has a valuable role in economic development of each country. India's massive rail network is hit by an average of 300 accidents a year. A number of locating and positioning sciences and technologies have been employed to efficiently handle railway accidents. Among them geographical information system (GIS) as a locating and global positioning system (GPS) as a positioning system have been considered as highly efficient. GIS is implemented for defining geo referenced locations, storing attribute data and displaying data on maps. Safety management in railway is required to avoid or mitigate damages. The railway industry is adapting various new tools and techniques to yield high productivity, to attain safety and sustainability. The damages can be avoided by accident prevention and development of a system to predict before the occurrence of accidents. The damages can be mitigated by reduction of negative effects of accidents after its occurrence through proper emergency and management services. Being closely associated with passenger and goods transportation; railways have high risk associated with them in terms of human lives and cost of assets. New technologies for railways and better safety measures are introduced time to time but still accidents do occur. Thus, a proper strategy is required for maintenance and inspection of tracks. A procedure for digitization of rail defects is then developed in integration with a GIS tool (Gram++). Five aspects are considered during site-layout planning: (1) Study of advanced techniques used in detecting cracks in rails. (2) Selection of a site to carry out crack detection. (3) Identification of cracks using USFD testing. (4) Digitization of selected site from Indian Rail map using GRAM++. (5) Preparation of the GIS based model. (6) Cost analysis for estimation of quantities of materials required for rail repairs and replacement.