The objective of the RAIL (Robotic Aid to Independent Living) project is to develop a viable, low cost robotic aid, based upon the Handy 1 rehabilitation robot (fig. 1). The RAIL system will enable people with severe disabilities to gain independence in important daily living activities such as teeth cleaning, shaving and washing. Also attachments will be designed to allow the RAIL robot to ful...

The type and magnitude of loads passing through the track superstructure have a great impact on both the design and the performance of concrete sleepers and fastening systems. To date, the majority of North American research focusing on quantifying rail infrastructure loading conditions has been conducted on heavy-haul freight railroads. However, the results and recommendations from these studi...

Commuter rail systems are widely regarded as an effective transportation alternative to reduce energy consumption and emissions in large urban areas. Use of commuter rail systems in the United States is on the rise, with annual ridership increasing by 28 percent between 1997 and 2007 [1]. With growing concerns about the sustainability and environmental impacts of transportation, modal energy ef...

In our Rail Human Factors approach, we define the human as the starting point for our interdisciplinary research on the design of human-machine interfaces in railway systems. One key focus of this approach is on the future workplace of the rail traffic controller. In this paper, a collaboration project between human factors scientists and trained rail traffic controllers is presented. Based on ...

This paper focuses on the problem about how to efficiently process the emergency of rail transit and guarantee the lowest accident loss in a short period of time, which is the urban rail transit management policy that makers are faced with, and which develops a high integrated system with strong information based on contingency plans to give the decision aid of urban rail transit emergency even...

Correspondence to: D. Levinson (e-mail: [email protected]) Abstract. This paper examines the full costs, defined as the sum of private and social costs, of a high-speed rail system proposed for a corridor connecting Los Angeles and San Francisco in California. The full costs include infrastructure, fleet capital and operating expenses, the time users spend on the system, and the soc...

in this paper, we propose a sensitivity analysis for evaluating the effectiveness of recovery solutions in the case of disturbed rail operations. indeed, when failures or breakdowns occur during daily service, new strategies have to be implemented so as to react appropriately and re-establish ordinary conditions as rapidly as possible. in this context, the use of rail simulation is vital: for e...

The process of surveying crane runways has been continually refined due to the competitive situation, modern surveying instruments, additional sensors, accessories and evaluation procedures. Guidelines, such as the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) 12488-1, define target values that must be determined by survey. For a crane runway these are for example the span, the position ...

Nonlinear vibration of parabolic springs employed in suspension system of a freight car has been studied in this paper. First, dynamical behavior of the springs is investigated by using finite element method and the obtained results are then used in vibration analysis of a railway freight car. For this purpose, dynamics of a parabolic spring subjected to a cyclic excitation has been studied ...