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Ambient intelligence for freight railroads
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by J. M. Reason
and R. Crepaldi
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Within the freight railroad industry, there is currently an industry-wide
effort to enable intelligent telemetry for freight trains. The
conventional wisdom is that greater visibility of the status and
proper functioning of trains would enable business transformation
in numerous areas, including predictive maintenance, schedule
optimization, and asset utilization. However, this effort to derive
business value through new technology may also have significant
environmental benefits. For example, failure prediction can
drastically reduce derailments, thereby protecting the environment
from the harmful effects of hazardous material spills. Equally
important, better visibility of trains can lead to more efficient
scheduling of trains, allowing more trains to move freight. Studies
show that trains are three times more fuel efficient than trucks, and
transferring just 1% of truck freight to railroads can reduce
greenhouse gas emissions by 1.2 million tons annually. In this
paper, we describe the potential benefits of employing a new,
intelligent telemetry infrastructure for freight railroads. One
proposed approach called SEAIT, or Sensor Enabled Ambient
Intelligent Telemetry, is a wireless sensor network approach to
supporting sensing and communication for advanced freight
transportation scenarios. As part of a proof-of-technology
exploration, we describe some preliminary performance results of
SEAIT.
 Full paper
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PDF
