UTAR Lee Kong Chian Faculty of Engineering and Science undergraduate students formed a team for their final year project and integrated design project to develop a prototype of smart railway monitoring system based on fibre optic sensors and artificial intelligence. The team is supervised by Associate Professor Dr Shee Yu Gang and Professor Dr Yau Kok Lim, which consists of students from Bachelor of Engineering (Honours) Electronic and Communications Engineering, who are How Yao Kang, Tan Chun Lin, Lum Hui Tian, and Olivia Ong Yee Ming from the Bachelor of Science (Honours) - Software Engineering.

The students’ projects support the  government’s initiatives to improve the public transport system  with a good operation and monitoring system for the public transport network, especially the railway transport system, such as the KTM Komuter, LRT and MRT systems. In the operation of railway system, an effective predictive monitoring system is crucial to alarm the operator before any damages or disruption of services happen.

This project has obtained the generous support of Tech-Store Malaysia Sdn Bhd, with the sponsorship of RM 5,000 as the project seed fund for the purchasing of vital project components. Tech-Store Malaysia Sdn Bhd is a leading provider of integrated facility management system, and integrated command and control systems in the field of transportation (including railway, airports, seaports, subway stations, etc.), education, telecommunication, logistics, automotive, energy and utility and more.

The company director, Mr Eugene Tan is passionate to bridge the university research teams with  industry needs, and to productize the research outcomes for practical industry applications. With this initial fund, students will be able to kick start the development of the smart railway monitoring system, which will be definitely an important solution that benefits the nations in maintaining an uninterrupted and safe public transport system. In this project, fibre optic sensors, namely fiber Bragg gratings (FBG) will be attached to the prototype of a rail and train to capture signals which are generated from the strain and temperature changes. The real-time data is processed and “learned” by the machine learning algorithm to detect anomalies in the operation of trains and the rail track.

On 23 June 2023, Mr Eugene Tan and his assistant Ms Janice visited the faculty to present the contribution for the project seed fund. The visit was attended by UTAR Vice President for Internationalisation and Academic Development Ir Prof Dr Goi Bok Min, LKC FES Deputy Dean for R&D and Postgraduate Programmes Assoc Prof Ir Dr Ling Lyod, LKC FES Deputy Dean for Student Development & Industry Training Assoc Prof Ts Dr Lee Kim Yee, LKC FES Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering Head Assoc Prof Ir Dr Chang Yoong Choon, Centre for Railway Infrastructure and Engineering Chairperson Assoc Prof Ir Dr Chua Kein Huat, Assoc Prof Dr Shee, Prof Yau and students.

The faculty highly appreciates the contribution and looks forward to having more collaborations with Tech-Store Malaysia Sdn Bhd in developing practical industry solutions.