Continuous wheel condition monitoring is indispensable for the early detection of wheel defects. In this paper, we provide an approach based on cepstral analysis of axle-box accelerations (ABA). It is applied to the data in the spatial domain, which is why we introduce a new data representation called navewumber domain. In this domain, the wheel circumference and hence the wear of the wheel can be monitored. Furthermore, the amplitudes of peaks in the navewumber domain indicate the severity of possible wheel defects. We demonstrate our approach on simple synthetic data and real data gathered with an on-board multi-sensor system. The speed information obtained from fusing global navigation satellite system (GNSS) and inertial measurement unit (IMU) data is used to transform the data from time to space. The data acquisition was performed with a measurement train under normal operating conditions in the mainline railway network of Austria. We can show that our approach provides robust features that can be used for on-board wheel condition monitoring. Therefore, it enables further advances in the field of condition based and predictive maintenance of railway wheels.

Safe train positioning is a key technology to make rail transportation more efficient and cost-effective. Within the EGNSS MATE project, the project partners SBB, DLR, and IABG researched the use of European Global Satellite Navigation Systems for this application. The main contributions are the development of a novel map-based sensor fusion algorithm, the development of a test catalogue for jamming and spoofing cyberthreats, and the collection of a large and rich dataset for testing and validation. The dataset includes over 200 h of sensor data and ground truth data, covering most of the Swiss normal gauge network. In addition, tests were conducted to assess the impact of jamming and spoofing attacks. Results show promising performance of the algorithms on most of the lines, excluding some long tunnels and sections with heavy multipath. The findings of the project results will help to introduce safe train positioning into ETCS by boosting development and standardisation efforts.