Evaluating the Wheelset Health Status of Rail Transit Vehicles: Synthesis of Wear Mechanism and Data-Driven Analysis.

The security and reliability of rail transit vehicles in service are greatly affected by their wheel-rail contact. Thus, modeling the wear of wheelsets and monitoring their status is important for improving safety and reducing costs. A key issue involves evaluating the wheelset status accurately and using this as the basis for developing effective maintenance strategies and measures. However, the open nature of actual wheel-rail systems and their inconsistent environmental conditions make it difficult to construct a precise theoretical model that covers both wheelset wear and status evaluation. In this paper, a synthesis approach for evaluating the wheelset health status of rail transit vehicles is proposed. The wheelset health status is defined, and then a data-driven wheelset health evaluation model is developed. Potential causes of deviations between the model and reality are analyzed based on a theoretical wear mechanism, and application prerequisites for the proposed model are given. A case study involving the Shanghai Metro shows that the proposed approach operates well and can, therefore, be applied in practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]