In development, this graphic on the leftshows the vision for automated analysis to forecast track settlement and geometry anomaly growth. The Lightweight Deflectometer on the right is emerging as an important tool to assess ballast stiffness and settlement.
The University of Nebraska track deflection system demonstrated how critical continuous deflection measurements are for detecting emerging threats and quantifying problems at known problems like transitions.
This image from my dissertation shows how we aligned and correlated data at that time - not quite manually, but database power helped. Now, emerging technology and machine learning can power the same types of conclusions, faster.