Project PI: Dr. Masoud ElGhoniemy
Project Team: Dr. Ahmed Allam, and Prof. Ramesh Pokharel
Research area: Intelligent transportation

Abstract

Railroads play a major role in Egypt‘s economy through providing a cost effective means of transportation for humans and goods. Recently, the Egyptian railroads have been implicated by major accidents. The major source of these accidents has been attributed to miscommunications between the road crossing operators and the train driver. The primitive equipment use accentuates the effect of human errors.

Radars have been successfully introduced in the automotive industry for safety and leisure reasons. Automotive radar presents a systematic method of warning that reduces human intervention in accident prevention and control, which led to its widespread adoption in high-end cars.

Radars as collision warning and prevention systems can be an important part of the R&D policies to mitigate railroad accidents. The proposed radar is an extension to the radar currently used in automotive design that operates in the GHz range with added features that pertain to railroad. These features represent the characteristics of the railroads which include extended range, type of objects to be detected and the different warning types.