Video-based classification of railway track areas for GNSS-based virtual balise solutions in the ERSAT GGC project
Résumé
Train location is of main use in railway signaling applications, today with the help of equipment on tracks. This equipment's role is to detect the train presence on a track section. In the European standard ERTMS/ETCS (European Rail Traffic Management System/European Train Control System) for the signaling, control and train protection this is performed thanks to a balise or a group of balises installed on tracks to give a passing train a position reference. The balise initializes the odometer, and the train position is computed by the odometer as a distance run since the last relevant balise group. In level 3 of ETCS, the train location shall be sent by the train itself to the ground. It will allow reducing the number of trackside equipment on the one hand, and on the other hand allow implementing moving block circulation in order to reduce the train spacing thus improve line capacity. Mainly driven by economic reasons and thus, acceleration of ERTMS penetration into the networks, the use of GNSS-based systems and, in particular, their introduction in signaling systems is seriously investigated today as a positioning opportunity included in ETCS and tested all around the world. Most of the past projects focused on the development of localization unit and their performance evaluation or more globally on the demonstration of operational signaling solutions based on a GNSS-receiver. As the suitability will be strongly linked to local GNSS quality determination, impact of multipath, signal attenuation or obstruction, one of the objectives of the EU ERSAT GGC project will deal with the development of a methodology and toolsets for classifying track areas. A video-based tool will be used in order to characterize the reception environment of the GNSS signals along real lines with a limited time of experimentation.
The paper presents the project and how the tool will be used in it.