Projects

RailTEC Current and Recent Research Projects

 Safety and Hazardous Materials Research

Current

  • Train accident rates based on track quality, traffic control system,
    and traffic density.
  • Supporting Rail Corridor Risk Management Systems (RCRMS) development of updating accident rates and risk factors evaluation.
  • Wayside defect detector data mining for prevention of
    mechanical-caused derailments
  • Supporting Association of American Railroads (AAR) Tank Car Committee
  • Supporting Advanced Tank Car Cooperative Research Project (ATCCRP)
  • An  integrated railroad transportations safety risk management framework
  • Analyzing approaches to develop and implement an accident reporting database system to collect information on the nature and extent of damage to U.S. DOT-specified hazardous materials bulk packages (i.e., portable tanks and cargo tank motor vehicles)
    involved in accidents

Recent

  • Toxic inhalation hazard (TIH) tank car transportation risk analysis
  •  Environmental risk of hazardous materials transport
  • Optimized tank car safety design
  • Railroad hazardous materials route-risk analysis
  • Positive Train Control (PTC) effect on hazardous materials transportation risk
  • Optimal investment in track quality upgrade to maximize train safety
  • Train speed and hazardous materials transportation risk
  • Track quality, traffic control system and train accident rate
  • Prediction of broken rails

Railroad Line and Network Capacity Research 

Current

  • Impact of passenger train operating strategies on freight capacity
  • Detailed analysis of interaction of freight and passenger operation
  • Optimization of maintenance windows to minimize delay
  • Standardized metric and modeling of rail capacity
  • Decision support tool for long-term capacity planning
  • Optimal network planning and routing with heterogeneous traffic
  • Trip time minimizer for optimal track upgrade strategy
  • Parametric capacity model for multiple tracks

 

Recent

  •  Impact of freight and passenger train heterogeneity on capacity
  • Effect of PTC and ECP brakes on capacity
  •  Micro-analysis of causes of train delay
  • Impact of advanced wayside inspection technology effect on
    safety & capacity
  • Optimizing investment to maximize line and network capacity
  • Optimizing train network routing with heterogeneous traffic