THEORY
Troubleshooting problems are especially valuable for automatic systems controlling the traffic of rolling stockin real-time as well as for the systems used during stationary maintenance, part replacement and repair planning.
In Moscow land transport model changes.
Classical minimum-time transportation problem [1, 2, 4] doesn’t assume any supplementary processing of resources at the points of destination. The elementary variant supposes that the processing of each consignment begins immediately after it arrives at the destination. It is a model without process queues.
Transport nodes play central role in freight traffic. In spite of construction of new Russian port transshipment facilities the demand for them isn’t satisfied (for instance in international trade only 70% of demandis met). Thereupon thereis a need toincrease the efficiency of transport nodes particularly by optimization of management of transshipment and port facilities on the basis of modern information and computer technology.
SCIENCE AND ENGINEERING
Structural elements of the rolling stock are of great importance for the safety of passengers and freightage, especially it concerns friction units, because some of them are operated under rude conditions. The presence of abrasives, absence of lubricant, specific spectrum of absorbed load provoke severe wear of contact surface.
The control of operability of railway facilities and structures presupposes exploitation of systems based on modern hardware and software tools. The fact, that those systems in different countries are based on divers concepts and operation algorithms, doesn’t affect the task of upgrading of hardware and software of control subsystems used to achieve processing speed and validity in order to identify symptoms (values), preceding failures.
In order to optimize the use of oxyhydrogen mixtures in internal combustion engines, various indices of the electrolytic cell conditions have been tested with regard to its physical parameters. Density of the current passing through the electrolyte is perceived as key indicator of effectiveness and output capacity. Experiments were staged in a variety of physical settings: under different pressure, temperature, distance between the electrodes, varying electrode square area and strength of the electrolyte solution.
The comprehensive review of the development of hybrid cars production from the origins through the year 2012 shows significant differences between various countries and regions over the world as for the levels of manufacturing and sales.
The methods used toincrease temperature resistance of bituminous concrete pavement are in the focus of researches in the sphere of road engineering which study first of all the bituminous concrete mixtures with polymer modified cementing bitumen. But the most common polymers of styrene-butadiene-styrene type, like DST-30–01, Kraton, Lupren LG, considerablyincrease costs of highways construction. That’s why the researchers have restarted study on possible use of the waist of tyre manufacturing as modifier.
The study refers to the powder of discretely devulcanized rubber which serves as modifier under the name of Unirem.
The authors’ technology permits to manufacture polymer astringent bitumen.
Evaluation of low temperature properties of such material were conducted during typical testing according to AASHTO TP1 standard that figures on the list of specifications «Superpave».
The tests revealed the data on crack resistance of rubber-bitumen cementing component of highways. A new method of analysis of deformation of cementing properties under low temperature and v aried speed of reconstruction of lost properties is proposed. The results of “dry” and “wet” modes for the initial and modified bitumen components are compared.
Bringing in of rubber granules by “dry” mode doesn’t ensure stability of the properties of bituminous concrete pavement. While the introduction of the rubber granules into bitumen and concrete mixture together with rubber-bitumen cementing component positively affects crack growth resistance and reduces the total costs of highway construction.
Power consumption rate setting influences energy saving in the process of train traction. Possible growth of cruise, line and route speed is limited by track infrastructure, safety requirements and by additional power consumption.
Therefore there is a problem of assessment of possible cruise speed growth under the conditions when there are speed restrictions due to the infrastructural issues (there are 4900 speed limits imposed a long of about 6000 km within the rail network of JSC Russian Railways), as well as of estimation of supplementary power inputs.
Such a system should be completed by the methods of statistical assessment of power and time losses caused by imposed speed restrictions. The dependencies between specific power consumption rates for the traction are found, given the example of cruise speed at Moscow-Vyazma track section. The number of coaches in a passenger train is also considered as specific indicator.
The analysis of received data permitted to decompose singular restrictions into point and prolonged limits. The survey of railway staff opinions helped to determine certain dependencies between speed, train length, and some safety precautionvalues to be further used to compute time and electric power losses.
ECONOMICS
An active position of Russia in relations with trade partners as well as targeted interaction of the government and foreign trade actors are necessary in order to use benefits and advantages following Russian adherence to WTO processes.
Russian roads will become better.
The causes and problems of crisis in socio-economic systems are considered as the main reason that influences the situation of railways.
The indicator of the level of crisis situation in a system is proposed. The crises are classified by institutional sign, which helps to better understand their phenomenon. The study pays special attention to Kondratiev waves (also called supercycles, great surges, long waves, K-waves, the long economic cycle) and the cause-and-effect relations within them. The Kondratiev supercycles are taken as a reference point for the brief relevant study of developments of Russian railways in 19–20th centuries, including the impact of military risks of the reviewed period. The study substantiates the consistency of assessment of a crisis as of the event that is characteristic of a system, organization or economic sector at any stage of their developments. The conclusion accentuates the necessity to promptly assess the risks and to develop crisis management measures for railways, which run primary risks following general economic crises.
The growth of profitability of passenger traffic is among the main tasks of railways. The best solution is to find an optimum balance between customer demand (possible train occupancy) and transportation offer (existing coaches rolling stock), taking into consideration the cycles of passenger flow variations (fluctuations considered weekly, by ten-day periods, monthly, seasonally, annually). The problem of optimization of traffic scheduling should not be limited to evaluation of profits from ticket sales and coach operational costs but should account for a number of qualitative and quantitative indices of the given route of a passenger train.
The profitability of passenger traffic depends mostly on two parameters: rate of passengers alteration (shift) and rate of operation use of train capacity. The critical values there-of are determined for seasonal cycles like «winter», «summer», «spring-fall». The created patterns help to forecast the number of passengers for forthcoming periods and to optimize thus the number of coaches operated for the given itinerary.
The researches have resulted in adoption of operation manual which governs train route scheduling and algorithms of specially engineered software packages. The results, if further implemented, may maximize profits of the railways.
ADMINISTRATION, MANAGEMENT AND CONTROL
Volvo and Ericsson offer car, internet connection.
The system of Integrated Management of Resources, Risks, Reliability Analysis at all the Stages of Life-Cycle (the short name URRAN is due to abbreviation of Russian spelled project title) has been dev eloped by Research & Design Institute for Information Technology, Signalling and Telecommunications on Railway Transport (JSC NIIAS) in cooperation with its parent company JSC Russian Railways and other partners in order to create a modern technology of support of decision-making in the sphere of reliability and operation safety of railways.
The problem of respect of the train schedules is important for railways of different countries. It is insufficient to compose the schedule, it is necessary to create and to maintain the optimum conditions for it should be respected. Analysis of fulfillment of schedules and of some mathematical applications used for traffic control and planning shows that there are some less known regular occurrences, useful to plan and assess the density of train flows. For instance there is a widely spread opinion, based on standard equation, that if more trains pass by a given leg then the volume of traffic is bigger. Or less is the interval between the trains, more is traffic capacity use ratio. Practices and researches show meanwhile that the interval between the trains can’t be reduced to arbitrarily small value. Besides, while the inter-train interval reduces, the gap between the actual and idealized traffic capacity grows. The study defines factors to be considered while creating conditions for schedule respect at the branched track divisions. Some tools to control super-density of trains at the track divisions and to optimize the regulations in effect on the freight and passenger traffic are proposed. The whole system of proposed equations and algorithms is aimed at respecting of schedules rather than on scheduling itself.
The tools are proposed to adjust and to make conform to each other the planned volumes of traffic and the traffic capacity of the legs.
A comparatively new issue for Russian transport system is introduced and proposed for discussion. The brief analysis shows that there are two different approaches depending on the given fields of activities.
There are fields where voluntary self-regulated organizations may be useful. Capacity of selfregulated organizations can be realized in some spheres of railway business, for instance in machinery construction, in the sphere of private operation of rolling stock, as the state legal regulations have not yet been adopted these in fields.
Secondly, there are fields where the access is legally restricted to members of self-regulated organizations only (or by certification received from them). Such practices became legally binding in 2010 in construction sphere, so it is the same for the construction of railway infrastructure.
The list of promising spheres of self-regulated activities composed by the author includes namely services to passenger (as a functional sphere common for all kinds of transportation including air, railway, river and road transport), researches, professional training and some others. There are no rigid conclusions as for the usefulness of voluntary self-regulated institutions in the railway sector of economics but there is a wide space for discussions.
The number of freight cars in Russia has considerably increased lately (more than 1 mln units in 2011), but the rate of satisfied demands of customers for freightage has on the contrary reduced. The time of delivery is increasing. As there is no shortage in cars the problem resides in non-efficient operation of private car rolling stock. The capacity of reduction of delivery time should be considered through reducing staying idle time and delays under technical and loading operations rather than by increasing technical speed. So the problem of enhancement of freightage should be seen and approached firstly as an economic and technological process.
According to technology in force the car traffic is organized in conformity with the plan of train making-up. But the plan, which is adopted for a full year period, is optimum for a certain assessed volume of car traffic. As a rule, it’s the most probable value of traffic density. And there are considerable fluctuations from and towards the average value during the year.
In order to put the plan of train making-up in conformity with real traffic density it is proposed to implement the technology of prompt updating of train making-up plan and of selection of car traffic operation. The updating supposes the choice of a variant that permits to deliver all goods in time, depending on their logistics characteristics, and with minimum possible costs. It should be taken into account that the updating of train making-up plan at one station has a direct, and sometimes, negative impact on the plans of other stations of a rail network. In order to avoid negative effects it is necessary to compute critical max and min values of car traffic that allow maintaining the actual plan.
The proposed planning and scheduling are based on a simulation model, that, processing data on the approaching trains, number of the cars within the local network and their logistics characteristics, results in scheduling the trains traffic towards destination point.
The patterns of integrated computation are shown for departing routing and for through trains planning.
The article describes Internet distributed denial of service- attacks (DDoS-attacks) and proposes classification of such offences by the objectives and tools of realization, making distinction between typical methods and those based on the hierarchy of generalized structure. The hierarchical classification proposed in the article can be considered to be universal from the point of view of DDoS-attacks mechanisms and sufficient for understanding of the processes of their organization.
The hierarchy-based approach can significantly reduce the time of analysis during solving typical problems, necessary for the protection of a system and for neutralization of malicious attempts. Such classification can serve as a basis for engineering of the tools of detection and identification of DDoS-attacks in certain protocols at application level which makes it not only analytic but practically oriented as well. See the modern electronic service systems for customers in the transport sphere it can be useful for the protection of this sector too.
ENGINEERING ECOLOGY
Rail transport has always pretended to be most resource conserving in terms of natural resources consumption per unit of transported goods and ecologically less harmful as for emission and discharge of contaminants. Nevertheless the issue of the quality of purified effluent at the installations of JSC Russian Railways is still urgent and the environmental activities are among the most demanded engineering tasks.
Regardless of almost ultimate renunciation of steam traction, the railways increase water consumption because of the growth of their length and traffic capacity. An important part of the water is consumed irrevocably (in passenger coaches, for reception of steam, fabrication of ice) as the rate of water recycling and reuse is about 30%. The remainder goes to surface water bodies. The most harmful are: cleaning and steaming posts for rolling stock, disinfection posts for cars, locomotive and wagon depots etc. The most common pollutants are oil, petrol, diesel fuels, phenols, dissolved acids. Carbon monoxide, nitrogen oxide, hydrocarbon, phenols are emitted at different stages of operations and so form the priority indices of the level of pollution.
Different tools of purification have their own advantages and disadvantages. The main industrial method of chlorination can’t ensure the totality of hygienic and ecological requirements. The up-andcoming industrial method is decontamination of waters by ultraviolet radiation. The basic principles of decontamination by ultraviolet instruments, together with mode of processing of waters, results’ monitoring tools and indices are described.
Ultraviolet radiation finds also some other applications. The proposed method of control of waters is based on the capacity of most organic matters of different classes to absorb light in the range of 200–280 nanometer. The proposal of the authors consists in measuring ultraviolet rate (A 254) with the wavelength of 254 nanometer in quartz dish with measured solution layer’s thickness of 10 mm, distilled water serving a solution of comparison. A spectrophotometer of any model capable to take measures in ultraviolet spectral region can be used. Ultraviolet rate is a new optical index, which can define demand of chemical oxygen, biochemical consumption of oxygen, contents of residual organic impurities in purified wastewaters. The correlation dependencies «A254– demand of chemical oxygen» and «A254 – biochemical consumption of oxygen» permit to assess the level of quality of purified wastewater. The proposed method can ensure continued real-time monitoring of the quality of water purification.
The risk of illegal interference acts in the airports and on board of aircrafts with the use of dangerous objects and self-made explosive devices, hidden in the clothes and in the shoes of passengers, is still high.
The measures on neutralization of such risks depend on the level of terrorist threats in a given country. In order to respond to terrorist alert it is necessary to use the integrated approach so that any separate kind of preflight screening has its own function within the framework of security measures. To simplify the process of shoes control there are some special radio-metal devices (Magshoe of Israel, Shoe Analyzer Metal Detector of Italy, some Russian devices).
The deployment of the radio-metal locators needs financial resources. But the costs should be reasonable and substantiated economically. But at the same time the process of screening should respond, as far as it’s possible, to customers’ interests. The example of relevant economic substantiation is described for a device installed at the airport of 20 mln passengers / year and a breakeven point in two years from installation is proved.
See the Russian climate there is always a task to find most efficient systems of heating of industrial sites in transport sector. The article considers possibility to use infrared gas heaters in car repair shed.
Radiation heating is more efficient if compared to convection system as it results in more even distribution of temperature in the premises, fast changing of temperature to the required level, reduces effects of airflows, and consequently the dust level. It also saves at about 15-30%% of heating power. These conclusions are substantiated by mathematical methods. The algorithms of correct installation are also shown.
It is proved that thanks to well-engineered heating process, infrared heaters are ecologically less harmful than heating systems with gas burning in boilerhouses. They are safe and conform to the job safety standards in effect.
As total length of engineering structures within the railway network of Russian Federation exceeds some thousand km, their reliability has a direct impact on the traffic safety.
The reliability and safety of their operation depends on correct maintenance. Two approaches prevail in calculating of time spans of maintenance of a bridge: the permanent one that uses mean values for bridge maintenance works, and the flexible one that uses the results of the assessment of actual state of a bridge. The trend to use the least approach now dominates.
The authors use the method of probabilistic model of a structure as of a complex technical system to forecast the limits of faultless operation. So the control of technical state of engineering structure is considered under the conditions of damage accumulation till the determined level [1–5].
Automation of the control with the help of a specially designed software package permits flexible interventions when the real state of a structure demands replacement or reinforcement works. The model under the study demonstrates the advanced accumulation of damages in one of the bridge span elements and the control of the safety of the whole construction uses two levels of limit states [6].
The programming language for software package is С#. Installation package facilitates the operations assisting to design a new construction or to generate a construction based on standard prototypes.
The software package of computation of optimum time spans for preventive replacements of the elements of engineering structures has some special features: high generality as it fits any kind of engineering structures, interactivity while computing. It conforms to any moment of operation of structures (from the beginning of operation or at any other moment), suits rowing function of failures, considers all possible variants of replacements. It also takes into account different optimization scenarios (minimum visits to the structure, resources saving, climate specific conditions). Invariance as for train types is also of importance.
All the organizations that design or operate railway structures can efficiently use the software.
Industrial zones adjoining transport locations and railways need efficient treatment hydro-facilities. The continued study of MIIT researchers concerns hydrobiological methods of fighting pollution of rivers and lakes by discharged waters. The technique replaces chemical agents via hydrobiological and hydro technical processes.
The installation proposed is a tankage that resembles a sewer with an isolated inlet. The sewer is well adjusted and the water comes from the stream by gravity with the help of an original hydro device. The aeration of waters takes place by overflow and level difference.
The process of purification of waters passes within artificial specific ecosystem (water fleas, mollusk, protozoa, and some Pisces etc). The above mentioned species purify the waters themselves (as water flea, mollusk) or assist the plants by creating specific ecosystem in the limits of hydro- and bio tableland of artificially built brook
This project seems more ecological and can be widely implemented under certain conditions.
HISTORY WHEEL
Historical review covers the period of the 1930s and reveals labor conditions, food and other goods provision of the workforce, social conditions of the railways of Smolensk region. Some of the facts show that the Smolensk subsidiary of Moscow Institute of Railway Engineering, then training the workers in the evenings, gained wide popularity. The lack of engineers was to be compensated by accelerated training of young people. There are also some statistical data on the rail transport developments.
Commemorative historical article is devoted to the 125th anniversary of Mikhail Bonch-Bruevich (1888–1940), founder of Russian electronic industries and broadcasting, corresponding member of the Academy of sciences of ex-USSR. One of his merits was to organize broadcasting of musical concerts for the first time in Europe…
In 1909 he graduated from the military higher college of electric engineering as a second lieutenant. In 1913 he published his first research paper on the theory of spark discharge and was awarded some prizes. At the beginning of the world war I he became a chief of one of two Russian spark radio stations responsible for communications with Russian allies – Great Britain and France… It was a start of his career of a brilliant radio engineer…
Archival publication from the journal «Railway Business», 1900.
BIBLIO-DIRECTIONS
The review of the book: Balalaev, A.S., Leontiev, R. G. Transport and Logistics Interaction in Multimode Freightage. Monograph. Moscow, Training and methodological center of rail transport. 268 pp. (2012).
The book contains system analysis of problems and tasks, referred to logistic follow-up of freight traffic in multimode transportation. The authors have revealed the particularities of origins and of actual conditions of transport and logistics structures, the study is based on strict criteria of assessment, quality standards. The conclusions and recommendations can be useful for the experts in logistics and transport services.
The review on the book: Zabirov, H. Sh., Shapkin, I. N. Logistics of Railway Freightage (Actual State, Theory, Practices, Outlook). Moscow, VINITI of Russian academy of sciences editions. 343 pp. (2012).
The contents of the book widely cover the issues of engineering of logistics methods of management of freight and passenger traffic. The ideas of the authors are illustrated and proved with the help of many concrete cases concerning practices of stations and local railway networks, of e-documents circulation, freightage with firm schedule fragments, promising techniques of logistic centers. There is an important focus on the intelligent transport systems concept and its implementation in logistics. The monograph will be useful to a wide spectrum of railway experts, will help to solve the tasks of optimization and management of rail traffic. And it will certainly be a good piece of knowledge for the students of transport universities, colleges and high schools.
Selected abstracts of Ph.D. theses.
Selected list of new books on transport and transportation.
