Automatic Configuration for Remote Diagnosis and Monitoring of Railway Equipments

Abstract: Today, there is no standard system for performing maintenance on heterogeneous railway equipments. Maintenance staff needs a standard application capable of diagnosing and monitoring heterogeneous on-board equipments. We propose to build a web-based diagnosis and monitoring system. The main advantage of our approach is that it offers a well known and user friendly interface: a web browser (such as Netscape Navigator or Microsoft Internet Explorer). In addition, it gives the possibility for remote diagnosis and monitoring railway equipments. Thus experts, not necessarily on site in the depot, can make diagnosis and detect faulty components. They can inspect, more than one vehicle at a time, directly from their office. The onboard communication system and related network management services provide a unified entry point to the train data for diagnosis. We have built an automatic configuration approach for such a maintenance system. As a result, this maintenance system can be installed on any vehicle without previous device-specific knowledge about that vehicle. This paper is intended for people concerned with industrial applications to the Internet and especially for those developing remote monitoring tools for embedded devices.