1. Introduction
Railroads play a critical role in the United States’ transportation sector, serving as one of the primary means of freight transportation. According to the United States Bureau of Transportation Statistics, railroads were responsible for moving 18.5 percent (by ton-miles) of the nation’s freight, worth
$403 billion, in 2023 [
1]. Bridges form a vital part of the rail freight network. Half of the 100,000 railroad bridges in the United States are over 100 years old and were constructed when the minimum vertical clearance requirements were lower than the current standards, thus making them prone to impacts by over-height vehicles [
2,
3]. These impacts to railroad bridges can exceed the bridge design impact load and can lead to structural damage as well as service disruptions, resulting in danger to public safety, disruption of traffic, and potential significant loss of revenue for railroad owners [
4].
While numerous studies have been conducted that emphasize the gravity of the railroad bridge impact issue in the United States [
5,
6,
7], the railroad bridge impact problem is not limited to the United States. Results from a survey conducted by the World Road Association show that various railroad bridge owners across the globe consider bridge impacts as a major issue [
8]. NetworkRail in the United Kingdom reported that there were 1,624 railroad bridge impacts between April 2020 and March 2021 across their network [
9]. In a study conducted by Coleman et al. [
10], they reported that the United Kingdom rail network experiences around 2,000 railroad bridge impacts yearly, which results in the loss of approximately £23 million for the rail authorities. Similar issues are found in New Zealand, where railroad bridge impacts cause significant delays and cost KiwiRail an average of around
$650,000 per year between 2010 and 2014 [
11]. The above data shows that bridge impacts are a significant problem worldwide with huge cost implications for the railroad owners.
While major full-on impacts are relatively rare, minor impacts such as when vehicles scrape underneath bridges can occur frequently. Because such scrapes can compromise the structural integrity of railroad bridges and often go unnoticed, detection is important. The most common approach for impact detection involves the monitoring and instrumentation of bridges with accelerometers; impacts are assumed to occur when the vibration levels exceed a predetermined threshold. These monitoring systems generally make use of wired sensors which have been widely adopted in practice for structural health monitoring (SHM) [
12,
13,
14]. However, these wired SHM systems often require substantial labor and are costly to deploy and maintain.
Wireless smart sensors (WSS) technologies have emerged as promising alternatives to traditional wired sensor systems in SHM applications, offering advantages such as easier installation and reduced maintenance costs [
15]. WSSs are equipped with onboard processing capabilities and wireless communication, which enable them to provide rich information [
16,
17,
18], allowing the assessment of a structure’s condition to be conducted more autonomously, efficiently, and on-demand. To this end, Fu et al. [
19] developed a wireless monitoring system for detecting impact events for long-span highway bridges. Moreover, the system employed predetermined thresholds to identify impacts. Although a threshold-based approach can identify major impacts which result in sufficiently large vibration, the more common railroad bridge impacts are often difficult to distinguish from train crossings. Therefore, the use of a threshold-based approach is prone to misclassification of events and unreliable for impact detection.
To address this issue, researchers have proposed the use of machine learning for railroad bridge event classification and impact detection based on acceleration responses obtained from WSSs [
4,
20,
21]. These studies utilize cloud computing, which involves first transferring the data remotely to a centralized location (i.e., the cloud) where the machine learning models are applied. The results show that the use of machine learning produces more accurate outcomes in terms of correctly classifying railroad bridge events and identifying impacts. Hoang et al. [
18] developed a cloud-based data retrieval and visualization framework for railroad bridges. Dang et al. [
22] proposed a cloud-based digital twin framework for SHM and validated the approach on a railroad bridge. However, these studies may not be effective for applications that require real-time or near real-time inferences. The challenge arises due to the significant time required to transfer the entire dataset from the sensor nodes to a central location over low-bandwidth wireless connections and potential wait times due to the queued data from a previous event. Additionally, the target railroad bridges can be in areas with poor connectivity, resulting in intermittent delays in uploading data. Therefore, to meet the demand of real-time or near real-time decision making, the computation needs to be performed on the WSS.
Edge computing paradigms seek to deploy computational resources at or near the location where the data is acquired, thus reducing or eliminating the need for large amounts of data to be collected at a centralized hub [
23]. Some researchers have implemented edge computing on WSSs in SHM applications. For example, Mondal et al. [
24] proposed a theoretical framework for anomaly detection using edge computing. Hoang et al. [
18] proposed an approach for on-board reference free displacement estimation from measured acceleration that was implemented on the Xnode WSS platform [
25,
26,
27,
28]. V.Shajihan et al. [
29] implemented edge computing for vision-based displacement estimation of in-service railroad bridges. Despite these developments, current edge computing hardware and software implementations on typical WSSs lack the necessary resources to efficiently support making machine learning predictions using measured data that will facilitate real-time or near real-time decision making.
In this paper, a new artificial intelligence (AI)-enabled WSS framework is proposed that will facilitate machine learning at the edge. The proposed framework integrates the capability of the OpenMV H7 Plus module [
30] to implement machine learning models directly with the Xnode WSS platform, leveraging its wireless sensing and communication abilities. Rapid notification of impacts enables quick response and minimizes risk to the public after railroad bridge impacts. Subsequently, the efficiency of the framework is illustrated using field collected data from railroad bridge events. The remainder of the paper is organized as follows:
Section 2 discusses the devices required to create a framework for an AI-enabled WSS and the integration of an edge device and a next generation WSS platform.
Section 3 introduces the example application used to validate the developed framework.
Section 4 demonstrates the efficiency of the proposed approach using railroad bridge field data. The developed framework is shown to be highly flexible, allowing it to be applied to other SHM tasks that require making machine learning predictions on a wireless sensor platform.
3. Railroad Bridge Impact Detection – Event Classification
The railroad bridge event classification algorithm proposed by Lawal et al. [
21] is implemented on the OpenMV module for this research. For the convenience of the reader, a concise summary of the approach is described in this section.
A schematic of the event classification algorithm is shown in
Figure 6. Because features extracted from freight train crossings and bridge impacts are often similar and the fact that freight train events are much more frequent than other event types, a heuristic approach is first used to identify freight trains. This heuristic approach is implemented using an event duration threshold, which is defined based on the typical known length of local freight trains. If the duration of an event exceeds the defined threshold, the event is automatically classified as a freight train event without the need for further analysis. For shorter events, further analysis is still required, as passenger trains can have a duration similar to bridge impact events. Thus, a neural network classifier is developed to delineate between bridge impacts and passenger train crossings. Note that the decision to first use a heuristic approach to identify freight train events helps to address the bias problem in training the neural network, as most of the recorded events correspond to freight train crossings.
For the neural network classifier, a fully connected neural network was implemented comprising two hidden layers, with each layer comprising fifteen nodes. The input layer accepts carefully selected features extracted from the Xnode’s accelerometer data, namely the peak absolute acceleration, the two most dominant frequencies obtained from Fast Fourier Transform, center of mass as denoted by Sitton et al. [
20] and spectral energy. These five features are extracted in each of the three acceleration directions result in a total of fifteen inputs into the ANN. The rectified linear unit (ReLU) activation function is applied to the hidden layers, introducing non-linearity and enabling the network to learn complex patterns. The network was designed for a binary classification problem, producing either 0 or 1 as its output corresponding to the two categories of interest: passenger train crossings and bridge impact events respectively. A sigmoid activation function is applied to the output layer. Note that all the impact data considered in this work pertains to minor impact events. The construction of the model is executed using the Keras Sequential API in Python.
This algorithm was implemented on the OpenMV in the Xnode. Results will be presented and discussed in the next section. For more details regarding this event classification algorithm, see Lawal et al. [
21].
5. Conclusions
In this paper, an AI-based framework for railroad bridge impact detection was developed using an edge implementation on wireless smart sensors. First, the hardware for the AI-enabled platform was developed by integrating the OpenMV H7 plus module with the Xnode. The framework was validated by implementing a railroad bridge impact detection system at the edge of the Xnode WSS platform. The results demonstrated efficient communication between the OpenMV module and Xnode devices. The event classification algorithm correctly classified all events and identified all bridge impacts with a high level of confidence. The event classification algorithm not only accurately predicts impacts but also outputs the maximum acceleration in all three directions. To efficiently utilize memory resources, the classification results are encoded into a single byte before being sent back to the Xnode.
Future research will explore the capabilities of the OpenMV module’s processor to allow for on-board training of machine learning models, in addition to using pre-trained models as was used in the application shown in
Section 4.2. On-board training allows the finetuning of pre-trained models when new data becomes available, making the system more robust and adaptable over time. This capability is particularly valuable as environmental conditions or structural characteristics may change over time, requiring periodic model updates to maintain accuracy. The ability to carry out on-board training also allows for using transfer learning. Transfer learning refers to reusing knowledge learned from one task in another related task. For example, the neural network trained in this work could be adapted for detecting events on highway bridges without the need for extensive data collection.
Finally, while the implementation in this work focuses on railroad bridge impact detection and event classification, the broader implication of this work is that machine learning applications for SHM are enabled on the Xnode WSS device.
Author Contributions
Conceptualization, O.L., S.A.V.S., K.M and B.F.S.J.; methodology, O.L and S.A.V.S.; software, O.L., S.A.V.S. and K.M.; validation, O.L. and S.A.V.S.; formal analysis, O.L. and S.A.V.S.; investigation, O.L., S.A.V.S., K.M. and B.F.S.J.; resources, K.M. and B.F.S.J.; data curation, O.L. and K.M.; writing—original draft preparation, O.L.; writing—review and editing, S.A.V.S., K.M. and B.F.S.J.; visualization, O.L. and S.A.V.S.; supervision, K.M and B.F.S.J.; project administration, B.F.S.J.; funding acquisition, K.M. and B.F.S.J. All authors have read and agreed to the published version of the manuscript.