MICROCONTROLLER BASED MODEL DESIGN OF A SAFETY SYSTEM FOR TRAINS USING GPS

Abstract

In every transport medium, safety is the utmost priority, especially in the case of railways. In recent years, with the introduction of high speed trains, speed and capability of railway system has exponentially improved, and inturn the traffic density has also increased. As a result, the requirement to design a reliable and safer system of high speed railway transportation enhances increasingly. This system introduces a safety concept to curb the train accidents, such as collisions. The basic role of the system is to plan and build up an ease security framework with high unwavering quality and respectability which wouldenhance safety aspect of the rail transportation by minimizing human errors. Also, the proposed system would curb the safety issues during adverse weather conditions such as heavy rain or foggy season, when the visibility is very less which might lead to a possible collision between two trains on the same track. The decommissioned ACD developed by KRCL had inherent issues as it failed to receive active inputs from the railway signal system. The
proposed system comprises of the equipment to detect the presence of another train on the same track in the nearby vicinity, and triggering a cascade of mechanism both automatically and manually which will help to stop the train and subsequently avoid the collision. The hardware used in the project includes ATMega 328 microcontroller, GPS module, Bluetooth module for communication and RFID reader for track detection. This paper presents a solution in which a microcontroller is used to execute a predetermined software algorithm to perform the precise action. Successful implementation of the proposed system would yield the desired result, in which the control room would detect the presence of two trains in the same region (using GPS) and on the same track (using RFID), and subsequently send an alert message (using Bluetooth) to the loco pilots to take the required action.