iRail: A novel architecture towards autonomous locomotives and intelligent infrastructures for developing countries

Due to the improvement of technology, the way human being do things are changing day by day. Railway infrastructures and locomotives have also been enhanced with latest technologies. Japan and Europe are the frontiers to adopt state-of-the-art technologies to railway systems. However we discover that there is a possibility beyond the current available systems. Though it is not an easy task to step beyond the best available technology, our aim was to develop novel autonomous locomotives with intelligent infrastructures to enhance railway systems in developing countries. In this paper we proposed a novel architecture called iRail by designing a rich radio frequency tag, its communicational protocols, and possible applications. The proposed system will manage incidents efficiently with faster recovery time, allow autonomous independent locomotive movements, provide comprehensive real time information to both passengers and operators, avoid collisions among locomotives and also between locomotive and rail road crossing vehicles, reduce overheads, and simplify maintenance by guaranteeing secure wireless communication system.