A Framework for Diagnosing Urban Rail Train Turn-Back Faults Based on Rules and Algorithms

Although urban rail transit provides significant daily assistance to users, traffic risk remains. Turn-back faults are a common cause of traffic accidents. To address turn-back faults, machines are able to learn the complicated and detailed rules of the train’s internal communication codes, and engineers must understand simple external features for quick judgment. Focusing on turn-back faults in urban rail, in this study we took advantage of related accumulated data to improve algorithmic and human diagnosis of this kind of fault. In detail, we first designed a novel framework combining rules and algorithms to help humans and machines understand the fault characteristics and collaborate in fault diagnosis, including determining the category to which the turn-back fault belongs, and identifying the simple and complicated judgment rules involved. Then, we established a dataset including tabular and text data for real application scenarios and carried out corresponding analysis of fault rule generation, diagnostic classification, and topic modeling. Finally, we present the fault characteristics under the proposed framework. Qualitative and quantitative experiments were performed to evaluate the proposed method, and the experimental results show that (1) the framework is helpful in understanding the faults of trains that occur in three types of turn-back: automatic turn-back (ATB), automatic end change (AEC), and point mode end change (PEC); (2) our proposed framework can assist in diagnosing turn-back faults.