Design and Implementation of a Weather Information Acquisition System Applied to Locomotive Remote Monitoring

Weather and track conditions, as well as other external factors, can change one of the key operating parameter of locomotives-adhesion, which is an important consideration in the control decision-making of electric locomotives. This paper introduces a real-time weather information acquisition system for locomotive remote monitoring, based on a classification of various common weather conditions along the Baoshen Railway, taking into account impacts on locomotive operation under different weather conditions. This system captures weather information from the website of Weather China using a web crawler application via Ethernet and enables communication with locomotive remote monitoring systems, as the first implementation of such monitoring based on information fusion related to weather conditions. The proposed system provides not only references for locomotive control tactics in remote driving mode, but also weather information display and warning to remote operators. With the application of this system on the operational Baoshen Railway, the existing intelligent locomotive driving system was optimized algorithmically with a rain/snow mode for automatic operation control under different weather conditions.