Safety-Oriented Train Control Systems Monitoring in Smart Railway Transportation: A Review

Abstract

Safety in railway transportation is becoming urgent due to a large number of accidents and its severe socio-economic impact on a global scale. Currently, various smart train control systems are being developed and these are enhancing the intelligence of individual train operation control. However, this in turn raises the complexity level and the control task would be even more complex. Furthermore, due to increased train's speed, abnormal interactions between train and control system could occur, which gives a sharp increase to serious accidents. Therefore, the systems' operation must be monitored continu-ously during the train's movement to check the correctness of its own behavior while generating control commands. In this study, we conduct a survey based on relevant and recent safety monitoring approaches proposed in the literature to get an insight into the state-of-the-art of the key problems of operation safety of train control systems.