FORSE - Fibre Optic Railway Sensing Equipment

铁路的维护成本太高，工人在寻找铁轨缺陷时会面临风险。我们的提议以一种新的方式利用现有的轨旁资产，有可能消除派遣工人到轨道上寻找问题而不是解决问题的需要。铁路是高价值的国家资产，是全球国家交通基础设施的关键组成部分。每年约有90亿GB用于维护铁路基础设施，以确保安全可靠的运营--其中近GB 2B用于定位和纠正缺陷。去年，人们花了100多万个工时走在赛道上。这种对人工检查和干预的依赖将工人置于危险的环境中，与铁路的雄心壮志不符。我们提议的创新解决方案将使用现有的轨旁光纤电缆来定义和检测独特的声学特征，并将其与跟踪列车位置的新型系统相结合，以产生一个自动化的始终在线监测系统，该系统不需要派遣工人到现场铁路上寻找缺陷。Forse项目将开发和试验一种创新的铁路监测系统，与现有的定制监测解决方案相比，该系统旨在以较低的部署成本自动检测大长度网络中的多种缺陷类型。我们的新概念将把来自轨旁询问器的分布式光纤声学传感数据与来自车载系统的列车位置和类型数据融合在一起，以产生无法从这些系统单独检测到的轨道和列车缺陷的新见解。由此产生的监测解决方案有可能显著减少铁路资产检查的资源需求，允许资源重新定向并用于修复问题--降低铁路工人的安全风险，提高资产价值和可用性。

Railways cost too much to maintain and put workers at risk while looking for track defects. Our proposal uses existing trackside assets in a new way that has the potential to do away with the need to send out workers onto the tracks looking for problems instead of solving them.Railways are high-value national assets and are a critical part of national transport infrastructure globally. Around £9Bn is spent annually maintaining railway infrastructure to ensure safe and reliable operation -- with nearly £2B being used to locate and rectify defects. Over a million manhours were spent last year walking the track. This reliance on manual inspection and intervention puts workers in a risky environment and is not in keeping with the ambitions of the railway. Our proposed innovative solution will define and detect unique acoustic signatures using existing trackside fibre-optic cables and combines it with a novel system tracking train location to yield an automated always-on monitoring system that does away with the need to send workers onto a live railway to hunt for defects.The FORSE project will develop and trial an innovative railway monitoring system designed to automate the detection of multiple defect types over large lengths of the network with low deployment costs compared to existing bespoke monitoring solution. Our novel concept will fuse distributed fibre-optic acoustic sensing data from trackside interrogators with train location and type data from onboard systems to generate new insights on track and train defects that cannot be detected from these systems in isolation. The resulting monitoring solution has the potential to significantly reduce the resource requirements for rail asset inspection allowing resource to be redirected and targeted towards fixing problems -- reducing safety risk for rail workers and improving asset value and availability.