A mathematical programming approach to railway network asset management

Abstract

A main challenge in railway asset management is selecting the maintenance strategies to apply to each asset on the network in order to effectively manage the railway infrastructure given that some performance and safety targets have to be met under budget constraints. Due to economic, functional and operational dependencies between different assets and different sections of the network, optimal solutions at network level not always include the best strategies available for each asset group. This paper presents a modelling approach to support decisions on how to effectively maintain a railway infrastructure system. For each railway asset, asset state models combining degradation and maintenance are used to assess the impact of any maintenance strategy on the future asset performance. The asset state models inform a network-level optimisation model aimed at selecting the best combination of maintenance strategies to manage each section of a given railway network in order to minimise the impact of the assets conditions on service, given budget constraints and performance targets. The optimisation problem is formulated as an integer-programming model. By varying the model parameters, scenario analysis can be performed so that the infrastructure manager is provided with a range of solutions for different combination of budget available and performance targets.

The impact of summer heatwaves on railway track geometry maintenance

“…PNs are capable of modelling complex systems with concurrencies and dependencies in a graphical description. The PN simulation is a stochastic technique which accepts any distribution for transition times, and so can provide greater detail in modelling degradation, inspection, and maintenance than comparable techniques 27 .…”

“…The PN simulation is a stochastic technique which accepts any distribution for transition times, and so can provide greater detail in modelling degradation, inspection, and maintenance than comparable techniques. 27 Petri nets have been used to great success for several track asset management studies. 10,[27][28][29][30] Common features among these models includes the use of the Weibull distribution, which best fits the observed degradation rate data.…”

“…27 Petri nets have been used to great success for several track asset management studies. 10,[27][28][29][30] Common features among these models includes the use of the Weibull distribution, which best fits the observed degradation rate data. 7 Also, a modular approach is followed to describe the combination of different system processes.…”

Railway track availability modelling with opportunistic maintenance practice

“…Petri net (PN) modelling has been demonstrated to be a highly flexible method for several successful asset management studies 1,13,[29][30][31][32] . Of these, Prescott and Andrews present the most complete exploration of railway track geometry management with opportunistic maintenance 13 .…”

Proceedings of the Joint International Resilience Conference, JIRC2020

“…The existing literature in the field of optimising intervention programs use simple grouping (Furuya & Madanat, 2013;Van Horenbeek & Pintelon, 2013), graph theory (Hajdin & Lindenmann, 2007;Lethanh et al, 2018), two-step optimisation (Fecarotti & Andrews, 2018;Hankach et al, 2019;Kerwin & Adey, 2020), and use bi-level optimisation models (Lu et al, 2016;Ng et al, 2009;Zhang & Alipour, 2019) to consider some of the dependencies. The first three groups simplify the problem by considering simplified dependencies between the interventions and the effects on the service provided and by reducing the number of possible combinations for grouping interventions.…”