Supplemental material for the paper - "Obstacle detection on rail-tracks: Study on situations for requirement specification"
In recent years, there has been an increasing effort to shift more traffic to rails. Driverless operation – similar to automated metro systems – is desirable to optimize the operation and energy consumption, making them more attractive for passengers. Due to the open environment, people or objects can get onto the track.
As a first step in developing obstacle detection system for safe driverless operations, it is imperative to identify the obstacles that are likely to obstruct the track area and lead to an accident.
Hence, we establish a database of railway accidents that focuses on the obstacles intruding the track area, their description and other related data. These situations aim to serve as a basis for deriving the requirement specifications for technical obstacle detection systems.
The situations spreadsheet contains organized data from 2143 railway accident reports, comprising of 1650 collisions and 493 near misses. For each accident, 9 different parameters were recorded. Overall, 49 obstacle categories were identified from the database.
The accident reports were collected from the railway accident investigation boards of several countries and from german news portals. The sources are listed below:
1) German Federal Bureau of railway accident Investigation: https://www.eisenbahn-unfalluntersuchung.de/
2) Presse Portal: https://www.presseportal.de/
3) Rail transportation safety investigation board Canada: https://www.tsb.gc.ca/eng/rapports-reports/rail/index.html
4) Japan Transport Safety Board: https://www.mlit.go.jp/jtsb/railrep.html
5) Australia transport safety bureau: https://www.atsb.gov.au/publications/safety-investigation-reports/?mode=Rail
6) Bahnblogstelle: https://bahnblogstelle.net/
7) Government of UK - Rail Accident Investigation Branch: https://www.gov.uk/government/organisations/rail-accident-investigation-branch
8) Transport accident investigation commision - New Zealand: https://www.taic.org.nz/
Harish Manjunatheswaran - harish.manjunatheswaran@ifs.rwth-aachen.de
Fabian Hampel - fabian.hampel@ifs.rwth-aachen.de