ONTOLOGICAL SUITABILITY ANALYSIS OF RAILWAY TRACKS FOR HIGH-SPEED TRAFFIC

Abstract

High-speed railways are developing rapidly in the world and, in particular, in Europe, and are promising in the territory of Ukraine. The purpose of the work is to check the consistency of the existing railway characteristics with the high-speed rail transport regulations by ontological means. The ontology was developed in the Protégé and MRcube software environments in the OWL DL profile using the Extreme methodology. Ontology population is automated in OpenRefine and INCEpTION based on texts and tables semantic annotation. Data extraction is done in Tabula for tabular data resources and FineReader for drawings. The ontological support was developed according to the model of multi-level concretization employing a distinction between data and rules modules. The ontology of resources is based on a tabular knowledge representation model. The usability of the proposed approach is experimentally evaluated on the example of the sections of the «Mariupol Port-Volnovakha» railway in Ukraine, «Plovdiv-Burgas» in Bulgaria and «Coswig-ESig G» in Germany and the corresponding regulations. The ontology can be used for conventional railways (e.g., 160 km/h), as well as further integration with the railway train model can be done. The ontology was evaluated by the domain expert and using the OntOlogy Pitfall Scanner. The scientific novelty of the work lies in the integration of heterogeneous resources of railway infrastructure characteristics by ontological means. The semantic annotation and formalization of railway regulations have been employed. Railway transport data extraction and validation processes were improved. The practical significance of the work lies in the possibility of improving the safety of train traffic by checking the suitability of railway tracks to ensure the declared speeds of high-speed and conventional railways.