Situation-Aware Integration and Transmission of Safety Information for Smart Railway Vehicles

Recent trend of railway train development can be characterized in several aspects : high speed, infortainment, intelligence in driving, and so on. In particular, trend of high speed in driving is prominent and competition for high speed amongst several techno-savvy countries is becoming severe. To achieve high speed, engines or motors are distributed over multiple vehicles of train to provide increased motive power, while a single engine or motor has been mostly used for conventional trains. Increased speed and more complicated powertrain system naturally incur much higher chance of massive accidents. From this perspective, importance of proactive safety control before accident takes place cannot be over-emphasized. To implement proactive safety control requires situation-aware integration and transmission of safety information obtained from IoT sensors. Types of critical IoT sensors depend on situational conditions. Thus, integration and transmission of safety information should be performed with IoT sensors providing the safety information proper for faced situation. This brief paper is to devise a methodology how to operate IoT sensor network enabling proactive safety control for railway vehicles and to propose a queue management based medium access control scheme.