Improving Railroad Grade Crossing Safety: Accurate Prediction of Train Arrival Times for Emergency Response Management and Driver Decision Support

Project summary:

This project is studying train delays to accurately estimate train arrival times at grade crossings to support in-vehicle driver alerts on personal navigation devices. It also will enable effective management of emergency response resources on the road network when trains at grade crossings may temporarily disconnect emergency vehicles from parts of the community they serve. The forecast of arrival times will use train-position information. The work is composed of two phases. The first phase focuses on the development of a historical algorithm to accurately model delays using train-position information. The second phase of the project is developing online algorithms to integrate real-time train position information into the forecasts. Amtrak data and CSX freight rail data are being used to test and validate the algorithms.

• OST-R summary report for this project (PDF)
• Data Driven Approaches for Passenger Train Delay Estimation, 2015 IEEE 18th International Conference on Intelligent Transportation Systems