High-speed railway catenaries are vital components in railway traction power supply systems. To ensure stable contact between the pantograph and the catenary, droppers are positioned between the messenger wire and contact line. The failure of one or more droppers will affect the power supply of the catenary and the operation of the railway. In this paper, we modify the You Only Look Once version five (YOLOv5) model in several ways and propose a method for improving the identification of dropper status and the detection of small defects. Firstly, to focus on small target features, the selective kernel attention module is added to the backbone. Secondly, the feature graphs of different scales extracted from the backbone network are fed into the bidirectional feature pyramid network for multiscale feature fusion. Thirdly, the YOLO head is replaced by a decoupled head to improve the convergence speed and detection accuracy of the model. The experimental results show that the proposed model achieves a mean average precision of 92.9% on the dropper dataset, an increase of 3.8% over the results using YOLOv5s. The detection accuracy of small dropper defects reaches 79.2%, representing an increase of 10.8% compared with YOLOv5s and demonstrating that our model is better at detecting small defects.

Optimizing travel routes in urban transportation networks is essential for enhancing traffic efficiency in major cities. This study focuses on optimizing the combined subway and taxi travel routes from Beijing Union University to Beijing South Railway Station, a critical route for students and staff in Beijing. To address this, we propose three genetic algorithms: the Standard Genetic Algorithm (SGA), the Multipoint Crossover and Elitist Selection Genetic Algorithm (MPEGA), and the Improved Dynamic Crossover and Mutation Rate Genetic Algorithm (IDCMGA). Experimental results indicate that MPEGA reduces the mean travel cost by 15.21%, the variance by 81.72%, and the standard deviation by 57.25% compared to SGA. Additionally, IDCMGA reduces the average by 1.76%, the variance by 63.16%, and the standard deviation by 39.30% compared to MPEGA. The improved IDCMGA algorithm demonstrates significant advantages over the other two algorithms in terms of global optimization capability, convergence speed, and stability, and is more adept at adapting to new traffic conditions to identify the optimal route. Optimizing this route not only reduces commuting time and costs but also alleviates traffic congestion, thereby enhancing the overall efficiency of the urban transportation system.