How can signal interference move through a tunnel?
At this point, it still wasn’t clear that a single train was the culprit.
What we’d established was that there seemed to be a pattern over time and location: Incidents were happening one after another, in the opposite direction of the previous incident. It seemed almost like there was a “trail of destruction”. Could it be something that was not in our dataset that caused the incidents?
Indeed, imaginary lines connecting the incidents looked suspiciously similar to those in a Marey Chart (Screenshot 2). Could the cause of the interference be a train — in the opposite track?
We decided to test this “rogue train” hypothesis.
We knew that the travel time between stations along the Circle Line ranges between two and four minutes. This means we could group all emergency braking incidents together if they occur up to four minutes apart.
We found all incident pairs that satisfied this condition:
We then grouped all related pairs of incidents into larger sets using a disjoint-set data structure. This allowed us to group incidents that could be linked to the same “rogue train”.
Then we applied our algorithm to the data:
These were some of the clusters that we identified:
[{0, 1},
{2, 4},
{5, 6, 7},
{8, 9},
{18, 19, 20},
{21, 22, 24, 26, 27},
{28, 29, 30, 31, 32, 33, 34},
{42, 44, 45},
{47, 48},
{51, 52, 53, 56}]Next, we calculated the percentage of the incidents that could be explained by our clustering algorithm.
The result was:
(189, 259, 0.7297297297297297)
What it means: Of the 259 emergency braking incidents in our dataset, 189 cases — or 73% of them — could be explained by the “rogue train” hypothesis. We felt we were on the right track.
We coloured the incident chart based on the clustering results. Triangles with the same colour are in the same cluster.