Design and Testing of a Robust High Speed Rail Prototype GPS Locomotive Location System

Tysen Mueller, Darren Dow, Jeff Brawner, Richard Bortins, Paul Davis, Doug Sweet, Santiago Alban and Fred Meek

Abstract:	The US Federal Railroad Administration is exploring technologies that will allow high speed passenger trains traveling at speeds of 120 mph or higher to operate on the same tracks as freight and other rail traffic. This approach is dictated by the exorbitant cost of laying separate tracks solely for the use of high speed rail traffic. The specific requirement is to automatically determine if a train has moved onto a siding, or a parallel mainline track, to allow another train to pass with a confidence level of 0.99999. The development and testing of the Seagull Technology (Seagull) prototype GPS Locomotive Location System (GLLS) was performed under three prior contracts with funds provided by the Federal Railroad Administration. This paper discusses the GLLS design changes that have been incorporated, based on the lessons learned from the Portland field tests performed February 2003. These design changes include the extensive use of rail database map matching to obtain a more robust GLLS prototype. The heading Kalman filter was also redesigned to provide an order of magnitude better performance. The revised prototype was then tested April 2004 near Oakland, California, on a locomotive provided by the Union Pacific Railroad. The results of that test reconfirmed the performance of the hardware and identified additional required changes to the software. After being modified, the software achieved its performance goals with the April 2004 raw field data.
Published in:	Proceedings of the 17th International Technical Meeting of the Satellite Division of The Institute of Navigation (ION GNSS 2004) September 21 - 24, 2004 Long Beach Convention Center Long Beach, CA
Pages:	729 - 740
Cite this article:	Mueller, Tysen, Dow, Darren, Brawner, Jeff, Bortins, Richard, Davis, Paul, Sweet, Doug, Alban, Santiago, Meek, Fred, "Design and Testing of a Robust High Speed Rail Prototype GPS Locomotive Location System," Proceedings of the 17th International Technical Meeting of the Satellite Division of The Institute of Navigation (ION GNSS 2004), Long Beach, CA, September 2004, pp. 729-740.
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