Ballast Real-time Information System

Ballast is an important part of railroad infrastructure. It is used as a support base for bearing the load from the track, as well as facilitating drainage of water from the track. Hence, the ballast layer serves an important role in track performance.

The TRB IDEA (Innovations Deserving Exploratory Analysis) Program's Rail Safety IDEA Final Report 30: Ballast Real-time Information System details the development and validation of an integrated system – Ballast Real-time information System (BRIS) – of hardware (SmartRocks) and software (Smart Computing) components that can predict track substructure safety concerns due to aggregate movement.