Tobias Herrmann | Searcharxiv

arXiv2026

A System for Train Condition Monitoring and Structural Health Assessment of Rail Vehicles

The ongoing digitalization of rail systems and the increasing use of artificial intelligence (AI) are fundamentally transforming the design, operation, and maintenance of rail vehicles. While fully automated operation at Grade of Automation 4 (GoA4) is well established in metro systems, its deployment in mainline rail remains limited. This is primarily due to stringent safety requirements and the complexity of open operational environments. Current perception systems based on cameras, radar, and lidar are effective in detecting objects but provide limited capability for reliably identifying impacts, collisions, and driving-over events. This paper presents a novel approach for real-time vehicle condition monitoring and impact detection that integrates structural sensor technologies with AI-based data analysis. The proposed framework addresses three key applications: (1) automated detection of impacts, structural damage, and driving-over events, (2) condition-based maintenance enabled by continuous monitoring, and (3) long-term data analytics to support vehicle design optimization. The results demonstrate the feasibility of the proposed approach and highlight its potential to enhance operational safety, enable predictive maintenance strategies, and support the transition toward fully automated operation in mainline rail systems

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arXiv2026

Driving-Over Detection in the Railway Environment

To enable fully automated driving of trains, numerous new technological components must be introduced into the railway system. Tasks that are nowadays carried out by the operating stuff, need to be taken over by automatic systems. Therefore, equipment for automatic train operation and observing the environment is needed. Here, an important task is the detection of collisions, including both (1) collisions with the front of the train as well as (2) collisions with the wheel, corresponding to an driving-over event. Technologies for detecting the driving-over events are barely investigated nowadays. Therefore, detailed driving-over experiments were performed to gather knowledge for fully automated rail operations, using a variety of objects made from steel, wood, stone and bones. Based on the captured test data, three methods were developed to detect driving-over events automatically. The first method is based on convolutional neural networks and the other two methods are classical threshold-based approaches. The neural network based approach provides an mean accuracy of 99.6% while the classical approaches show 85% and 88.6%, respectively.

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