Safety
Trackside worker safety is one of the leading safety concerns around the world. Workers are constantly exposed to risk when working anywhere along a rail line. This held true for a Midwest public subway system operator who looked to GAO for a solution to identify where and when trackside personnel were working and to reduce the risk to them. Using RFID and a peripheral voice alert device, designed and developed by GAO, train operators are notified in real time where work crews are located giving the train operator ample time to implement slowdown and proceed with caution procedures or stop the train.
The trackside safety initiative is just one example of how new applications can be rapidly prototyped and deployed. In addition to standard configurations GAO’s team of experienced engineers can design systems to meet specific application requirements.
In this case the metro subway operator decided to go one step further and had GAO build into the system further information on the trains and instructions to its operators. The peripheral readers also detect when they are entering a terminal and provide further instruction to the operators such as which doors should be opened, as well, it provides additional general purpose input output (GPIO) controllers extending the RFID reader’s ability to control other devices.
GAO has implemented a similar system for a Canadian rail operator in British Columbia in this case allowing them to determine the location of any car within their rail yard.