Prognostics and Health Management for an Overhead Contact Line System - A Review

The railway industry in European countries is standing a significant competition from other modes of transportation, particularly in the field of freight transport. In this competitive context, railway stakeholders need to modernize their products and develop innovative solutions to manage their asset and reduce operational expenditures. As a result, activities such as condition-based and predictive maintenance became a major concern. Under those circumstances, there is a pressing need to implement prognostics and health management (PHM) solutions such as remote monitoring, fault diagnostics techniques, and prognostics technologies. Many studies in the PHM area for railway applications are focused on infrastructure systems such as railway track or turnouts. However, one of the key systems to ensure an efficient operability of the infrastructure is the overhead contact line (OCL). A defect or a failure of an OCL component may cause considerable delays, lead to important financial losses, or affect passengers safety. In addition maintaining this kind of geographically distributed systems is costly and difficult to forecast. This article reviews the state of practice and the state of the art of PHM for overhead contact line system. Key sensors, monitoring parameters, state detection algorithms, diagnostics approaches and prognostics models are reviewed. Also, research challenges and technical needs are highlighte