A fault prediction method for catenary of high-speed rails based on meteorological conditions

Fault frequency of catenary is related to meteorological conditions. In this work, based on the historical data, catenary fault frequency and weather-related fault rate are introduced to analyse the correlation between catenary faults and meteorological conditions, and further the effect of meteorological conditions on catenary operation. Moreover, machine learning is used for catenary fault prediction. As with the single decision tree, only a small number of training samples can be classified correctly by each weak classifier, the AdaBoost algorithm is adopted to adjust the weights of misclassified samples and weak classifiers, and train multiple weak classifiers. Finally, the weak classifiers are combined to construct a strong classifier, with which the final prediction result is obtained. In order to validate the prediction method, an example is provided based on the historical data from a railway bureau of China. The result shows that the mapping relation between meteorological conditions and catenary faults can be established accurately by AdaBoost algorithm. The AdaBoost algorithm can accurately predict a catenary fault if the meteorological conditions are provided.