A Systematic Study of the Effect of Signal Alignment in Information Extraction from Railway Infrastructure Recording Vehicle Data

The maintenance and development of rail infrastructure in Africa is key to the future success of the African content. Development of a digital twin in the context of South African railway infrastructure will assist with the future need for effective maintenance planning and resource optimisation. As part of the process towards realisation of a railway infrastructure digital twin for South African railway infrastructure, the current study quantified the effect of various signal alignment strategies and errors on the ability of Singular-Spectrum Analysis to extract features that can be used when considering the evolution of track geometry over time. When minimal stretching is present in the data, the pairwise cross-correlation for the flattened matrices representing the two sets of elementary matrices for two subsequent measurement campaigns provide a latent space that looks promising for identifying changes in the track geometry as recorded by a track geometry car.