FORSE - Fibre Optic Railway Sensing Equipment

铁路的维护成本太高，在寻找轨道缺陷的同时，工人也面临着风险。我们的建议以一种新的方式利用现有的轨道旁资产，这有可能消除派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，是全球各国交通基础设施的重要组成部分。每年约有90亿英镑用于维护铁路基础设施，以确保安全可靠的运营，其中近20亿英镑用于定位和纠正缺陷。去年在这条赛道上花费了超过100万工时。这种对人工检查和干预的依赖使工人处于危险的环境中，与铁路的雄心壮志不符。我们提出的创新解决方案将使用现有的铁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系统相结合，从而产生一个自动的永远在线的监测系统，从而无需派工人到现场铁路上寻找缺陷。与现有的定制监测解决方案相比，FORSE项目将开发和试验一种创新的铁路监测系统，该系统旨在自动检测长长度网络上的多种缺陷类型，且部署成本较低。我们的新概念将融合来自轨道旁询问器的分布式光纤声传感数据与来自车载系统的列车位置和类型数据，从而产生对轨道和列车缺陷的新见解，而这些缺陷无法通过这些系统单独检测到。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针对解决问题，从而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.