Industry 4.0 Technologies Applied to the Rail Transportation Industry: A Systematic Review

BACKGROUND

Industry 4.0 technologies have been widely used in the railway industry, focusing mainly on maintenance and control tasks necessary in the railway infrastructure. Given the great potential that these technologies offer, the scientific community has come to use them in varied ways to solve a wide range of problems such as train failures, train station security, rail system control and communication in hard-to-reach areas, among others. For this reason, this paper aims to answer the following research questions: what are the main issues in the railway transport industry, what are the technologic strategies that are currently being used to solve these issues and what are the technologies from industry 4.0 that are used in the railway transport industry to solve the aforementioned issues?

METHODS

This study adopts a systematic literature review approach. We searched the Science Direct and Web of Science database inception from January 2017 to November 2021. Studies published in conferences or journals written in English or Spanish were included for initial process evaluation. The initial included papers were analyzed by authors and selected based on whether they helped answer the proposed research questions or not.

RESULTS

Of the recovered 515 articles, 109 were eligible, from which we could identify three main application domains in the railway industry: monitoring, decision and planification techniques, and communication and security. Regarding industry 4.0 technologies, we identified 9 different technologies applied in reviewed studies: Artificial Intelligence (AI), Internet of Things (IoT), Cloud Computing, Big Data, Cybersecurity, Modelling and Simulation, Smart Decision Support Systems (SDSS), Computer Vision and Virtual Reality (VR). This study is, to our knowledge, one of the first to show how industry 4.0 technologies are currently being used to tackle railway industry problems and current application trends in the scientific community, which is highly useful for the development of future studies and more advanced solutions.

FUNDING

Colombian national organizations Minciencias and the Mining-Energy Planning Unit.

A Survey on Data-Driven Predictive Maintenance for the Railway Industry

In the last few years, many works have addressed Predictive Maintenance (PdM) by the use of Machine Learning (ML) and Deep Learning (DL) solutions, especially the latter. The monitoring and logging of industrial equipment events, like temporal behavior and fault events—anomaly detection in time-series—can be obtained from records generated by sensors installed in different parts of an industrial plant. However, such progress is incipient because we still have many challenges, and the performance of applications depends on the appropriate choice of the method. This article presents a survey of existing ML and DL techniques for handling PdM in the railway industry. This survey discusses the main approaches for this specific application within a taxonomy defined by the type of task, employed methods, metrics of evaluation, the specific equipment or process, and datasets. Lastly, we conclude and outline some suggestions for future research.