Development of an Automated Railway Level Crossing Gate Control System using PLC.

This paper proposes a Programmable Logical Control (PLC) based automated railway crossing gate control system. The existing conventional railway crossing gate control system in Bangladesh is being operated manually which causes increasing amount of accidents at the crossings due to the carelessness in manual operation. Also, manual mechanism is time consuming. The gate controlling mechanism should be carried out ensuring safety to the road users and guarantying less time during gate opening and closing process. In this work, a prototype road and rail line model with automated railway level crossing gate controlling mechanism has been designed and implemented. At the train's level crossing arrival and departure side, a set of photoelectric sensors are strategically placed. Also for detecting any obstacles, reflective type photoelectric sensors are used strategically. The developed prototype system is simple, has fast operational speed and functions agreeably in laboratory setup. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]