ROPHS: Determine Real-Time Status of a Multi-Carriage Logistics Train at Airport

Tracking ground support equipment (GSE) in a high accuracy manner is crucial for both airport safety and optimal management of airport assets but the related researches and products are scarce. Tracking a multi-carriage logistics train is obviously most challenging compared with other single-carriage GSE. In this paper, we design a real-time on-board positioning and heading system (ROPHS) to obtain the real-time status of a multi-carriage logistics train which consists of a powered leading vehicle and one or several non-powered trailing vehicles. The status includes: (a) the accurate positions and velocities of any points on this train, and (b) the alterable number and linking sequence of trailing vehicles at any time of a trip. Technically, the hardware of the system relies on real-time kinematic (RTK) to obtain geolocation of the leading vehicle, and on gyroscopes, magnetometers and accelerometers to obtain headings of all vehicles. A geometry based recurrence algorithm is afterwards presented to calculate the positions of any trailing vehicles. In the end, the multiple model based tracking algorithm is proposed to compute the precision-improved locations and real-time velocities of the whole train. Different from existing traditional GPS or RFID based positioning techniques, the proposed system can reach centimeter-level accuracy, which enables collisions detection, especially those latent collisions that cannot be easily monitored or foreseen by crews' visual inspection.