%A DOVILE RAMA JOHN D. ANDREWS %T A Holistic Approach to Railway Infrastructure Asset Management %0 Journal Article %D 2015 %J Int J Performability Eng %R 10.23940/ijpe.15.2.p107.mag %P 107-120 %V 11 %N 2 %U {https://www.ijpe-online.com/CN/abstract/article_3108.shtml} %8 2015-03-01 %X
In the railway industry asset management decisions are focused on the maintenance, enhancement and renewal of assets in order to ensure a required level of dependability and improvement in services at the lowest whole life costs. To achieve these objectives system lifecycle models, rather than individual asset models, offer a greater advantage. The paper presents a modelling approach developed for constructing multi-asset system models to support well-informed railway infrastructure asset management decisions. The models are built using the Petri Net formalism and are analysed by a means of Monte Carlo simulations. A specific example of the railway superstructure model is presented. Its simulation results demonstrate the superiority of the system-wide model against individual asset models in terms of its accuracy in predicting the superstructure (system) performance and information available to support asset management decisions. Furthermore, by using the multi-asset system model interdependencies among maintenance regimes of different assets and different parts of the infrastructure can be modelled.