This week, Team T.I.D.E. continued exploring the relationship between weather conditions and track-circuit electrical signals, taking another step toward developing our drainage metric.

During our weekly liaison meeting with KB Signaling, we shared our latest data analysis and literature review. Our initial exploration included overlaying cloud coverage data from Open-Meteo with track-circuit signals and examining the second derivative of transmit current to identify potential recovery patterns.

We also presented findings from previous research on rainfall, ballast resistance, and drainage. Studies showed that water affects the electrical properties of railway tracks and that moisture recovery times vary significantly depending on ballast conditions. Based on these findings, we proposed that post-rain electrical signal recovery patterns could help indicate drainage conditions and eventually support track maintenance decisions. We also reviewed recent research using Physics-Informed Neural Networks (PINNs) to estimate ballast resistance, identifying potentially useful ideas for signal processing and noise filtering.

The KB Signaling team provided valuable feedback and offered additional datasets from multiple track locations, including periods with more frequent rainfall. We also discussed the possibility of comparing data before and after track maintenance to evaluate changes in drainage performance.

Moving forward, we plan to identify and characterize individual recovery events, improve data smoothing, and investigate additional weather variables such as temperature, wind speed, and solar position. We are also preparing for our on-site PDR presentation at KB Signaling on October 16!

Team T.I.D.E. is back with another update! This week was a big one for us, as we presented our Preliminary Design Review (PDR) to the class. We shared our ideas for the project, our progress with the track-circuit data and weather data, and our plan for the rest of the semester. It was also great to see what the other IPPD teams have been working on and to hear the feedback on our own work. We also had our second liaison meeting with KB Signaling, where we reviewed our progress and got answers to some questions about the data and the system architecture.

Onto next week, we will use the feedback from the PDR to improve our design and project plan. We are also excited to share that we have decided on a date to travel to the KB Signaling headquarters on October 16th! This visit will give us a closer look at the company and the systems our project will work with. Until then, we will keep matching weather data to track locations and building out our visualizations in Grafana. Jeff Fries mentioned that after we are done processing the datasets with our concept, we should ask them for more data to make sure our algorithm works.

Graphana illustrations

Team 9 aka T.I.D.E. is back! Last week was a particularly productive week for us. Like all other teams, we are continuing developing the Preliminary Design Review (PDR) report and presentation. On a note specific to us, we have continued exploring the provided track-circuit data and the Open-Meteo API for historical weather data. The biggest breakthrough however, was with getting accustomed to all the tools we will be needing to use throughout this project. Some of those tools are Grafana, Docker, and InfluxDB to support data storage, processing, and visualization. Finally, we completed the project roadmap and risk plan and shared both with the coach and liaisons for review.

Onto next week, we will continue refining the PDR report and presentation. Now that most of our members have had the tools set up, we will further analyze the track-circuit data and explore matching weather data to track locations and timestamps. Finally, we will incorporate feedback from the coach and liaisons into the project roadmap and risk plan.

9/18/2026

Since there were some initial problems with the blog software, we are unable to depict our first meetings with each other and our coach, Dr. Laura Cruz Castro, along with our initial brainstorming of our team name and logo. Briefly, we are one of two teams in IPPD who have the privilege to work with KB Signaling. Our team, the rain data team, selected the acronym, T.I.D.E. (Track Innundation Detection Engine) and the above logo to represent us. We believe both are fitting due to the imagery of rain and of tracks/engines depicting how we will merge both aspects in our project.

This week, we were able to successfully meet with one of our two liaisons, Jeff Fries, along with a platform architect at KB Signaling, David Zavetz. Unfortunately, Tony Spagnolia, our other liaison, was unable to attend the meeting. We discussed our understanding of the project proposal to clarify any questions we had and were provided initial samples of the database we will be integrating into our project. Along with the data, we were given insight into what programs and architecture are in place already and are acquainting ourselves with the software and data format that will be expected. Team T.I.D.E is hard at work making attempts to use this new software and data to get graphical results similar to what Jeff and David provided.