Hybrid neural network-aided strong wind speed prediction along rail network

Abstract

With the advent of networked rail operations and increasing risks caused by extreme weather conditions, there is an urgent need to enhance the safety early warning and emergency protection for rail under extreme wind environments. By deploying anemometers along the railway and monitoring the surrounding wind speeds, dispatchers can proactively take protective measures to mitigate the impact of severe weather on rail transportation. In particular, accurate time-series forecasting during periods when wind speeds exceed the threshold is critical for railway anomaly monitoring. This study employs Extreme Value Theory (EVT) to determine the threshold for strong winds. In order to identify high wind speeds, memory networks are used to memorize strong wind events in historical data. By combining the Gated Recurrent Unit (GRU) module with the attention mechanism, this study ultimately develops a hybrid neural network model in the prediction of wind speed. Based on real-world datasets of wind speeds along the Hangzhou-Haining intercity railway and along the Norway rail network via meteorological stations, the effectiveness of the hybrid neural network model has been verified by comparing base models. The proposed strong wind speed prediction has practical applications in enhancing early warning and rail safety under complex wind climate.