A Holistic Approach to Railway Infrastructure Asset Management

Volume 11, Number 2, March 2015 - Paper 1 - pp. 107-120

DOVILE RAMA and  JOHN D. ANDREWS

Abstract:

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.

References: 12

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