Monitoring of work execution processes in railway construction using expert technologies

The article presents the abstract theorem and practical options for monitoring the technological process of a railway track object construction using expert technologies. Railway construction as a complex dynamic system requires certain resources for its maintenance. Under these conditions, effective control over the work execution technology performed during the construction of railway track facilities is of decisive importance. This can be achieved by improving the existing engineering and technical support system for railway construction through the introduction of a subsystem for engineering and technological processes intellectual support for the railway facilities construction. One of the subsystem tasks is the effective use of automation tools with elements of artificial intelligence. The appearance of deviations from the planned requirements during the construction work execution, due to the stochastic nature of railway construction, leads to technology violations, a decrease in productivity, an increase in labor costs, prime cost, an increase in duration and, as a result, a deterioration in the railway track object operational characteristics. In order to avoid such a development of events, periodic monitoring of the technological solutions implementation is necessary. To this end, as part of the methodology formation for engineering and intellectual support of railway construction technological processes, a system for monitoring the technological processes implementation for the railway facilities construction has been developed. Monitoring includes three stages: parameters registration, assessment and forecast of the technological process implementation. Taking into account the formalization peculiarities of a number of tasks to be solved, a method for registering the indicators of the technological process implementation on a time interval was developed and described. The results obtained at the assessment stage made it possible to determine the possibilities of using an expert system built on a probabilistic inference model for processing the results of monitoring the work progress during the railway facility construction. The logical inference mechanism is organized on a system of feedback and inference based on probabilistic Bayesian logic. The forecast of the technological process implementation is based on general methodological issues of the Markov random processes application. The predictive model and the method for obtaining quantitative characteristics of the forecast are based on the interpretation of the simplest flow properties in order to analyze the dynamics of changes in its states. Based on the results of a theoretical study, the article presents the practical aspects of monitoring the work execution processes in railway construction using expert technologies on the example of the construction of a flooded railway subgrade roadbed. The results presented in the article were obtained in the course of a dissertation research carried out by the author.