Defect detection in rail fasteners is crucial for train safety, as defective fasteners can cause derailments and severe safety incidents. However, Existing algorithms often struggle in various real-world scenarios due to challenges such as obscured fasteners, motion blur in images, varying camera angles, and fasteners submerged in water. To address these challenges, we propose a Multi-scale CNN-Transformer Hybrid Network for Rail Fastener Defect Detection (MCHNet-RF2D), specifically designed to identify fastener defects in complex environments. Our approach constructs an efficient CNN block and a multi-scale Vision Transformer block to alternately extract local detail features and global semantic features of the fasteners. These features are seamlessly integrated through multi-scale fusion to enhance defect recognition robustness. By combining comprehensive global recognition with detailed local defect detection, MCHNet-RF2D outperforms existing CNN-Transformer hybrid networks by 2.8% and surpasses current fastener defect detection algorithms by 2.9%. In practical deployment on over 40 trains, our model successfully detected more than 2,000 fastener defects, demonstrating its effectiveness in diverse and challenging conditions.

In the Industrial Internet, computing- and power-limited mobile devices (MDs) in the production process can hardly support the computation-intensive or time-sensitive applications. As a new computing paradigm, mobile edge computing (MEC) can almost meet the requirements of latency and calculation by handling tasks approximately close to MDs. However, the limited battery capacity of MDs causes unreliable task offloading in MEC, which will increase the system overhead and reduce the economic efficiency of manufacturing in actual production. To make the offloading scheme adaptive to that uncertain mobile environment, this paper considers the reliability of MDs, which is defined as residual energy after completing a computation task. In more detail, we first investigate the task offloading in MEC and also consider reliability as an important criterion. To optimize the system overhead caused by task offloading, we then construct the mathematical models for two different computing modes, namely, local computing and remote computing, and formulate task offloading as a mixed integer non-linear programming (MINLP) problem. To effectively solve the optimization problem, we further propose a heuristic algorithm based on greedy policy (HAGP). The algorithm achieves the optimal CPU cycle frequency for local computing and the optimal transmission power for remote computing by alternating optimization (AP) methods. It then makes the optimal offloading decision for each MD with a minimal system overhead in both of these two modes by the greedy policy under the limited wireless channels constraint. Finally, multiple experiments are simulated to verify the advantages of HAGP, and the results strongly confirm that the considered task offloading reliability of MDs can reduce the system overhead and further save energy consumption to prolong the life of the battery and support more computation tasks.

As an indispensable part of Internet of Things (IoT), wireless sensor networks (WSNs) are more and more widely used with the rapid development of IoT. The neighbor discovery protocols are the premise of communication between nodes and networking in energy-limited self-organizing wireless networks, and play an important role in WSNs. Because the node energy is limited, neighbor discovery must operate in an energy-efficient manner, that is, under the condition of a given energy budget, the neighbor discovery performance should be as good as possible, such that the discovery latency would be as small as possible and the discovered neighbor percentage as large as possible. The indirect neighbor discovery mainly uses the information of the neighbors that have been found by a pairwise discovery method to more efficiently make a re-planning of the discovery wake-up schedules of the original pairwise neighbor discovery, thereby improving the discovery energy efficiency. The current indirect neighbor discovery methods are mainly divided into two categories: one involves removing the inefficient active slots in the original discovery wake-up schedules, and the other involves adding some efficient active slots. However, the two categories of methods have their own limitations. The former does not consider that this removal operation destroys the integrity of the original discovery wake-up schedules and hence the possibility of discovering new neighbors is reduced, which adversely affects the discovered neighbor percentage. For the latter category, there are still inefficient active slots that were not removed in the re-planned wake-up schedules. The motivation of this paper is to combine the advantages of these two types of indirect neighbor discovery methods, that is, to combine the addition of efficient active slots and the removal of inefficient active slots. To achieve this goal, this paper proposes, for the first time, the concept of virtual nodes in neighbor discovery to maximize the integrity of the original wake-up schedules and achieve the goals of adding efficient active slots and removing inefficient active slots. Specifically, a virtual node is a collaborative group that is formed by nodes within a small range. The nodes in a collaborative group share responsibility for the activating task of one member node, and the combination of these nodes’ wake-up schedules forms the full wake-up schedule of a node that only uses a pairwise method. In addition, this paper proposes a set of efficient group management mechanisms, and the key steps affecting energy efficiency are analyzed theoretically to obtain the energy-optimal parameters. The extended simulation experiments in multiple scenarios show that, compared with other methods, our neighbor discovery protocol based on virtual nodes (VN-NDP) has a significant improvement in average discovery delay and discovered neighbor percentage performance at a given energy budget. Compared with the typical indirect neighbor discovery algorithm EQS, a neighbor discovery with extended quorum system, our proposed VN-NDP method reduces the average discovery delay by up to $10.03\%$ and increases the discovered neighbor percentage by up to $18.35\%$ .

U-shaped Bolts & Nuts (UBNs) are essential for ensuring a smooth and continuous power supply to trains. UBN defects can lead to a mismatch between the pantograph and the overhead line, potentially causing severe damage to the pantograph and even halting train operations. Unfortunately, a specialized algorithm for detecting small-size UBN defects in high-resolution catenary inspection images under intricate real-world environments is notably absent. To remedy this, we propose a multiscale cross-attention convolutional neural network (CNN)-transformer two-branch fusion network (M2CTFNet). This network accurately detects small-size UBN defects across various natural scenes by integrating global and local features through a weight-based multiscale cross-attention fusion, and building a multiscale shuffling technique in the transformer branch. Extensive experiments demonstrate that M2CTFNet achieves a 2.7% higher precision and a 2.4% higher recall rate with lower computational cost and fewer weight parameters in UBN defect detection compared to state-of-the-art networks. Furthermore, M2CTFNet has been deployed on multiple inspection vehicles and has successfully detected several hundred UBN defects. These results verify that M2CTFNet is effective for addressing small object defects in challenging natural environments.

In an electrical safe microenvironment, all kinds of electrical appliances can be operated safely to ensure the safety of life and property. The significance of safety hazard factors detection is to detect safety hazards in advance, to remind the administrators to exclude risk, to reduce the unnecessary loss, and to ensure that the electrical operation is healthy and orderly before the occurrence of accidents. In this paper, batteries are selected as the primary research subject of safety detection because batteries are used more and more in the Internet of Things (IOT), and they often cause fire in the process of discharging and charging. The existing algorithms need to be embedded into the specialized sensor for each important electrical appliance. However, they are limited by the actual deployment, so it is extremely difficult to spread widely. According to the opinions above, an improved load disaggregation algorithm based on dictionary learning and sparse coding with optimal dictionary matrix period is proposed to detect potential safety hazards of battery loads. For safety-related electrical applications, doing so can increase interpretability. Through experiments, we test this algorithm on the REDD dataset, and compare it with the baseline algorithms (combinatorial optimization, factorial hidden Markov model, basic discriminative dictionary sparse coding algorithm) to achieve a degree of trust. The Mean Absolute Error (MAE) value is 8.26, which drops by 70%. The Root Mean Square Error (RMSE) value is 97.75, which is also better than those baseline algorithms.