Railway Security Monitoring System Using Vibration Sensor and ZigBee for Addis Ababa Light Rail Transit

Railways are prime mode of transportation and large infrastructures in many countries. Accidents occurring in railway transportation systems cause loss of precious lives and property. One of the major accidents occurring on railway transportation is at level crossing. So to avoid the level crossing accidents automatic gate control at a level crossing should be designed and applied. In this thesis automatic gate opening/closing operation is developed using PIC16F877A microcontroller and ZigBee technology. The system consists of mainly two sub sections, the base station and the train station. The base station receives an input from vibration sensor and feds to the microcontroller to be processed and send to control center via ZigBee transceiver. The amount of vibration coming from the train is measured using directional vibration sensor. In this thesis to find the level of the vibration a data measured from Sweden city train is taken and customized to fit the AA-LRT Salitemihret case. So using these data a corresponding analog voltage is obtained. The analog voltage is then converted to equivalent binary digits into a way the microcontroller is understood using ADC804. The binary digits are programmed in to away they give information about the position of the trains. Control central gets the position of the train then decision is made and a command to control the train side signals, road user signals and to operate the gate is sent back Via ZigBee. A voltage level 3.75 -5 volts (05 H) means the train is 282 meters away from the level crossing) a Red signal is displayed to the cars and passengers and a message "" Away is clear you can proceed with limited speed and care, thank you"" is displayed to the driver. In this thesis the simulation is done using Proteus software which is a nice interfacing environment and the program for this thesis is embedded C program.