Freight Tenant WILD and Manifest Data Processing

For a passenger railway that hosted a number of freight track-rights tenant operators, we served as the business representative on a multilateral project to install wayside Wheel Impact Load Detectors (WILD) and utilize that data for operational purposes (alerts, audits, billing, etc.)  The project involved providing the real-time information to the operations control centre (OCC) such that decisions can be made about whether the freight train is permitted to enter the passenger rail territory, and also matching real-time WILD data to a nightly freight manifest export for audit and billing purposes.  We were able to design a fuzzy algorithm that matches the WILD data (containing only car IDs, and only some of the time) to the Manifest data (having train IDs, but not always accurate, and often contains ‘complications’ such as cars being dropped off or picked-up en-route, on both scheduled and unscheduled bases).  This project improved the accuracy of the Manifest data being transmitted by tenant railroads, and reduced the instances of overweight cars, which indirectly contributed to improved host-tenant relationship.