04.12.2025

SAINTS researcher Poppy Fynes attends the 5th International Conference on Advanced Railways and Transportation

Poppy Fynes and colleagues attended and submitted a paper on autonomous railways ‘Milestone Determination for Autonomous Railway Operation’ to the 5th International Conference on Advanced Railways and Transportation (ICART) 2025 in Korea (November 2025).

Poppy shared with us the following:

In our paper, we argue that autonomous railway systems cannot rely on generic computer vision datasets and instead require route-specific contextual modelling, which we address through the concept of milestones—key points along a route that trigger operational state transitions much like human drivers do.

We then test this idea using a large dataset generated in the OpenBVE simulator, comparing a standard Gaussian Naïve Bayes model with our OwO method (The Observed weight of an Output). OwO applies milestone-dependent weights, meaning that different features—such as speed limits, acceleration, or braking rate—are given more or less importance depending on the current state. This leads to stronger and more context-aware predictions.

Our results show that OwO improves performance by around 5–25% across most states, especially when the train is adjusting speed or braking. These findings support our argument that milestone-driven, context-rich modelling provides a more reliable foundation for autonomous rail. We finish by suggesting future work on visual milestone detection and reinforcement learning to make the system more adaptable in real-world scenarios.