Intellectualization of engineering and technical support of railway construction
Authors: Polyanskiy Aleksey 
Published: July 2020

The article is devoted to the theoretical foundations of improving the engineering support of railway construction. One of the main purposes of the existing engineering support system is to evaluate the results of development and monitor the implementation of technological processes for the construction of railway facilities. In the course of the study, it was determined that a number of stages in the development and implementation of technological processes contain tasks for which the use of automated design and control systems is sufficient. However, there are tasks whose solution depends on the experience and intuitive abilities of the engineer (developer of organizational and technological documentation). To solve such problems, in addition to settlement procedures, logical ones are also necessary. In addition, the intensification of railway construction, many restrictions on the production of works and resources, as well as deviations from planned indicators, require prompt decision-making aimed at compliance with design requirements. Obviously, the total amount of information and data on the design and actual technological processes does not guarantee the efficiency and rationality in decision-making by an engineer. In this case, to solve technological, organizational and managerial tasks, it becomes possible to use some methods and means of artificial intelligence. In this regard, it was proposed to supplement the existing system of engineering and technical support for railway construction with a subsystem of engineering and intellectual support for the technological process of constructing a railway track. For the purpose of intellectualization and the formation of a new paradigm of engineering support for railway construction, an analysis was made of modern and promising practices in the development and implementation of technological processes from the perspective of the life cycle of a railway track object. It was found that modern technological processes for the construction of railway facilities should be flexible to changing working conditions. The study showed that this can be achieved through the formation of adaptive digital technological regulations. The basis of the digital regulation is the information model of the technological process. The model formation procedure is divided into stages containing tasks, the solution of which is possible using artificial intelligence tools such as expert systems, artificial neural networks, and genetic algorithms. A fundamental feature of the engineering and intellectual support of the technological process is the possibility of its operational regulation based on the results of monitoring its development over time. A feature of this approach is the need for the operational processing of a large amount of data that determine the development of technological processes over time, the conditions of work, the production capabilities of construction (contracting) organizations. For this, the mathematical and conceptual models of an intelligent automated system have been developed. Its main purpose is the operational solution of the problems of development and implementation of the technological process of construction of railway facilities. The results obtained during the study, as well as the developed tools, made it possible to determine the possibilities of integrating the developed methodology into the existing system for designing and managing the construction of railway facilities.
The results given in the article were obtained during the dissertation research performed by the author.