Radio Frequency Identification Based Rail Wagon Monitoring System

Even with the growth of electronics and communication there are still some jobs done manually, such as tracking of rail wagons. While running trains are tracked every two hours, wagons are generally tracked every cycle ranging from four to five days. The limitation of manually tracking the wagons is that there are chances of human error. For instance, an official at the shed notes the serial number of each wagon and then it is fed manually into the railway records. Thus there are two points where human error can occur - while recording it on paper and while feeding it into the system. Each wagon generally carries a combination of about twelve to fourteen numeric and alphabets, with five to seven digits signifying the wagon number, two-to-three alphabets indicating the owning railway and four alphabets indicating the wagon make or type. An interchange of digits/alphabets could result in conveying completely different information. Each error could result in generation of conflicting reports and has the potential to corrupt the entire database. The proposed design intends to solve the problem of manual error leading to automation of the wagon tracking system in railway system. The paper presents a Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) based rail tracking scheme. The system is based on RFID Global System for Mobiles (GSM) and embedded components. The scope of the paper is related to rail network.