“Railway as a Thing”: New railway control system in Egypt using IoT

Abstract

Railway control system is an essential part of railway infrastructure and is directly associated with the level of railway safety. Therefore in this paper we propose a railway control system based on the Internet of Things (IoT) to control different railway components. The system maps possible railway system components into connected objects that can share information and/or execute actions. The research focus on developing a configurable control agent that can control the railway system in Egypt by applying different business rules that can be tailored according to different railway safety requirements. This control agent keeps getting the updated information from all connected railway objects using different sensors and responds back by actions to these objects. The proposed control model has been tested using software simulators that simulate different railway components, and the system achieved smooth control of these railway components and mitigated the most common train accident root causes in Egypt.