Towards a Software-Based Approach to Smart Railway Maintenance

Proactive and predictive maintenance are crucial for the operation of railway infrastructures and vehicles. With this in mind, railway systems are now resorting to all sorts of sensing solutions to monitor operational conditions, which, in turn, is leading to an explosion of proprietary, non-interoperable, and non-standard systems that make smart railway maintenance (SRM) a daunting task. In this paper, the Software-Defined Railway Monitorization (SDRm) approach is presented, whose main objective is to provide a way to isolate monitoring applications from low-level sensing details. The paper provides some preliminary experimental results and prospects for real-world deployment.