The Open Automation and Control Systems Journal

2015, 7 : 1895-1902
Published online 2015 October 20. DOI: 10.2174/1874444301507011895
Publisher ID: TOAUTOCJ-7-1895

Railway Disaster Prevention and Snow Survey Design Optimization Technology

Yong Qin , Lei Zhu , Zhenyu Zhang , Linlin Kou and Xiaoqing Cheng
School of Beijing Jiaotong University, Beijing, 100044, P.R. China.

ABSTRACT

Snow disasters cause immeasurable losses to human society each year, threatening people’s lives and properties and therefore attaching much importance to the measurement of snow cover. Snowfall, however, is one of the most difficult to be measured among meteorological elements, especially on the railways. To solve this problem, the real-time monitoring of snow along the railway can be helpful. This can effectively avoid railway accidents caused by snowstorms, improving transport safety and efficiency as well as providing a quantitative reference for the safe operation of the railway. In this paper, a snow disaster prevention system is designed to measure the snow depth and issue the early warning. Also this paper achieves measurement by the integration of laser and video, where laser distance sensors detect snow depth and image sensors capture videos to find out whether the track is covered with snow and to obtain snow depth with the help of photographing rulers.

Keywords:

Laser, measurement of snow depth, railway disaster prevention, video.