Design and Implementation of Automatic Railway Gate Control System
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Date
2021
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Abstract
usually opened or closed manually by a gate keeper. Many railway crossings are not manned because of lack of
manpower. The few railway gates that are energized usually face the challenge of unavailability of electricity
especially in developing countries. This and in the event that there is no one to operate the railway gate when a
train approaches railway crossing, accidents could occur at such crossings. To avoid such accident and other forms
of human intervention at railway crossings, an automatic railway gate control system has been designed and
presented in this work. This paper describes the railway gate system operations and control involving track
switching stage and level crossing stage using ATMEGA A328P for simulation. The work can be divided into
hardware and software developments. The former includes the power supply unit (PSU), sensing system unit (SSU),
general notification system unit (GNU) and manual override unit (MOU), while the latter essentially involves the
necessary programming to operate the hardware components. The program for the system is based on ATMEGA
A328P microcontroller with Arduino C programming language. Besides, the work introduced a light display system
for basic operations and notifications such as stop, ready and go. Other forms of improvement on the existing
railway gate control systems carried out in this work include sound initialization for notification count and also a
locker sensor for manual override implementation. Reliability and continuity tests were carried out at every stage
of the design and simulation for efficiency and effectiveness of the automatic railway gate systems, and to reduce
the occurrence of railway accidents.