Fault Diagnosis for Railway Point Machines Using VMD Multi-Scale Permutation Entropy and ReliefF Based on Vibration Signals

The railway point machine plays an important part in railway systems. It is closely related to the safe operation of trains. Considering the advantages of vibration signals on anti-interference, this paper develops a novel vibration signal-based diagnosis approach for railway point machines. First, variational mode decomposition (VMD) is adopted for data preprocessing, which is verified more effective than empirical mode decomposition. Next, multiscale permutation entropy is extracted to characterize the fault features from multiple scales. Then ReliefF is utilized for feature selection, which can greatly decrease the feature dimension and improve the diagnosis accuracy. By experiment comparisons, the proposed approach performs best on diagnosis for railway point machines. The diagnosis accuracies on reverse-normal and normal-reverse processes are respectively 100% and 98.29%.