KORAIL Develops IoT System for Railway Track Detection with Nable Communications

SK Telecom announced that it has developed an IoT system for safe railway use in collaboration with Korail and Nable Communications.

This system is the result of the joint research agreement on the 'IoT-based infrastructure monitoring system' signed last May, and its core is to manage railways more efficiently by utilizing LoRa and LTE.

The development of railway IoT focused on the Seoul-Busan Gyeongbu Line, covering areas directly related to the safety of users and employees, such as rail temperature measurement, vehicle battery voltage measurement, vehicle reduction gear temperature measurement, vehicle vibration measurement, and automatic tension adjustment device power gauge measurement.

In addition, it was carried out simultaneously in areas where work efficiency is low due to the difficulty of meter reading, such as measuring lightning arrester leakage current, measuring the temperature of high-voltage cables in substations, and reading water usage.

A total of 80 sensor prototypes are installed on the tracks and equipment, with 10 of each, and if a result exceeding the normal range is measured, it is transmitted to the control system via the IoT network so that the railway company can take action.

In fact, in the case of the rail temperature measurement system, which used sensors attached to the tracks to measure the temperature every 10 minutes and sound an alarm if it exceeded 50°C, it actually sent temperature alerts about 10 times during the heatwave last August, allowing Korail to respond quickly.

In addition, information sent from the sensors can be checked on field personnel's smartphones, enabling more accurate responses in the field.

In this study Korea Railroad Corporation was responsible for the overall system construction and the selection of equipment and facilities to be monitored, SK Telecom was responsible for the construction and interoperability of the entire system and performance verification, and Nable Communications was responsible for the development of the control platform and devices.

Yoon Joong-han, Head of Research at KORAIL, stated, “By combining KORAIL’s railway operation know-how with SK Telecom’s cutting-edge IoT technology, we have introduced a new technology designed to help all railway users feel safer and more secure,” adding, “We will continue to pursue new challenges for safe and efficient railway operations.”