An explainable artificial intelligence approach for mud pumping prediction in railway track based on GIS information and in-service train monitoring data

Automatic and timely identification of mud pumping is important for the reliability and safety of railroads. The current mud pumping prediction model is based on monitoring the dynamic response of railway tracks. The essential geotechnical trigger factors such as the hydrological conditions are not well-considered in these prediction models, as that information is hard to be quantified, which unavoidably reduces the accuracy of the prediction. This paper proposes to utilize the Geographic Information System (GIS) to quantify the hydrological information along railway tracks. Through GIS analysis, the hydrological variables including elevation, near-river distance, rainfall, sink depth, and soil types are estimated and combined with in-service train monitoring data for model development. To deal with multi-attribute data, a dual-channel neural networks model is proposed to separately mine the characteristics in different attributes data for prediction. To further understand the prediction model, Shapely addictive explanations (SHAP) method is applied to estimate the importance of hydrological variables and reveal the possible relationships between the variables and the probability of mud pumping. The proposed approach is applied to a real-life case from the railway tracks in Australia to validate its effectiveness. The prediction results show that the proposed approach can predict mud pumping with balanced accuracy of 90.84%. The results confirm that integrating of GIS information and monitoring data can generate more accurate prediction and reduce the false prediction rate. Based on the explainable results, it is observed that rainfall is the most important hydrological variable that influences mud pumping occurrence. Apart from rainfall, groundwater-related variables show a greater impact on mud pumping occurrence than surface water-related variables. The explainable results also can help infrastructure managers to identify the most vulnerable sections in railway tracks, which facilitates targeted maintenance planning and track substructure design.