Traditionally, railway inspection and monitoring are considered a crucial aspect of the system and are done by human inspectors. Rapid progress of the machine vision-based systems enables automated and autonomous rail track detection and railway infrastructure monitoring and inspection with flexibility and ease of use. In recent years, several prototypes of vision based inspection system have been proposed, where most have various vision sensors mounted on locomotives or wagons. This paper explores the usage of the UAVs (drones) in railways and computer vision based monitoring of railway infrastructure. Employing drones for such monitoring systems enables more robust and reliable visual inspection while providing a cost effective and accurate means for monitoring of the tracks. By means of a camera placed on a drone the images of the rail tracks and the railway infrastructure are taken. On these images, the edge and feature extraction methods are applied to determine the rails. The preliminary obtained results are promising.

In this paper modelling and control approaches for fluidized bed combustion process have been considered, that are based on the use of computational intelligence. Proposed adaptive neuro-fuzzy-genetic modeling and intelligent control strategies provide for efficient combining of available expert knowledge with experimental data. Firstly, based on the qualitative information on the desulphurization process, models of the SO2 emission in fluidized bed combustion have been developed, which provides for economical and efficient reduction of SO2 in FBC by estimation of optimal process parameters and by design of intelligent control systems based on defined emission models. Also, efficient fuzzy nonlinear FBC process modelling strategy by combining several linearized combustion models has been presented. Finally, fuzzy and conventional process control systems for fuel flow and primary air flow regulation based on developed models and optimized by genetic algorithms have also been developed. Obtained results indicate that computationally intelligent approach can be successfully applied for modelling and control of complex fluidized bed combustion process.

Accurate models for heat load prediction are essential to the operation and planning of a utility company. Load prediction helps a heat utility to make important and advanced decisions in district heating systems. As a popular data driven method, artificial neural networks are often used for prediction. The main idea is to achieve quality prediction for a short period in order to reduce the consumption of heat energy production and increased coefficient of exploitation of equipment. To improve the short term prediction accuracy, this paper presents a kind of improved artificial neural network model for 1 to 7 days ahead prediction of heat consumption of energy produced in small district heating system. Historical data set of one small district heating system from city of Nis, Serbia, was used. Particle swarm optimization is applied to adjust artificial neural network weights and threshold values. In this paper, application of feed forward artificial neural network for short-term prediction for period of 1, 3, and 7 days, of small district heating system, is presented. Two test data sets were considered with different interruption non-stationary performances. Comparison of prediction accuracy between regular and improved artificial neural network model was done. The comparison results reveal that improved artificial neural network model have better accuracy than that of artificial neural network ones.

In this paper, an advanced thermal camera-based system for detection of objects on rail tracks is presented. Developed system is powered by advanced image processing algorithm, in order to achieve greater reliability and robustness, and tested on set of infrared images captured at night conditions. The goal of this system is to detect objects on rail tracks and next to them and estimate distances between camera stand and detected objects. For that purpose, different edge detection methods are tested, and finally Canny edge detector is selected for rail track detection and for determination of region of interest, further used for analysis in object detection process. In determined region of interest, region-based segmentation is used for object detection. For estimation of distances between camera stand and detected objects, homography based method is used. Validation of estimated distances is done, in respect to real measured distances from camera stand to objects (humans) involved in experiment. Distances are estimated with a maximum error of 2%. System can provide reliable object detection, as well as distance estimation, and for improved robustness and adaptability, artificial intelligence tools can be used.