Automatic Railway Level Crossing Traffic Management System: A Case Study of AALRT

Abstract

Among the accidents associated with the Railway transport system, railway level crossings are among the major contributing factors. Level crossings are vulnerable to accidents due to a number of reasons, but the main reason behind these is the negligence of road users, i.e. carelessness of pedestrians and vehicle drivers towards passive road signs. The Addis Ababa Light Rail Transit (AALRT) has thirteen level crossings in both EW and NS lines. The initial design of this crossing was supposed to provide automatic operation. A survey on one of the crossings at Autobus Tera revealed that the traffic control is semi-automatic; at the time it was manually operated as the system had failed. The decision to switch to semi-automatic from fully automatic was reached due to unavoidable accidents involving car-train collision or car- gate collision because of the lack of delay between the red light ON and gate closure. In this work a unique design of automatic level crossing traffic system is developed with provision of the necessary delay time to avoid collisions. The system is implemented and tested in prototype level, and it founds a robust design to avoid crashing in the level crossings.