Resilience Analysis of a Localization Solution for Railway and Tramway Vehicles under Failures in GPS Measurement Data Acquisition

In this paper, a localization solution for railway and tramway vehicles, relying on low-cost on-board sensor technology and on a Kalman-based data fusion scheme, is tested against failures in GPS measurement acquisition. Such failures can be caused by either non-favorable operating conditions (e.g, the presence of tunnels), or intentional/accidental service disruptions. Our analysis, carried out through simulation of a three-dimensional multi-body vehicle, highlights failure conditions under which the localization solution is shown to be resilient with respect to an acceptable performance level, as well as situations that the original framework is not able to cope with. In the latter case, a variant solution, still based on low-cost on-board technology, is shown to be able to recover satisfactory performance.