A risk-informed decision support tool for the strategic asset management of railway track infrastructure

Abstract

The provision of safe, efficient, reliable and affordable railway transport requires the railway track infrastructure to be maintained to an appropriate condition. Given the constrained budgets under which the infrastructure is managed, maintenance needs to be predicted in advance of track failure, prioritized and identified risks and uncertainties need to be considered within the decision-making process. This paper describes a risk-informed approach that can be used to economically justify railway track infrastructure conditions by comparing on a life-cycle basis infrastructure maintenance costs, train operating costs, travel time costs, safety, social and environmental impacts. The approach represents a step-change for the railway industry as it will enable economic maintenance standards to be derived which considers the needs of the infrastructure operator, but also those of users, train operating companies and the environment. Further, the risk-informed capability of the tool enables asset managers to deal with uncertainties associated with forecasting costs and the effects of track maintenance, and unavailability of data. The Monte Carlo simulation technique and a Fuzzy reasoning approach are used to address safety data uncertainties through probabilistic risk assessment allied to expert opinion. The approach is illustrated using data from three routes on the UK mainline railway network. The results demonstrate that the approach can be used to support strategic and tactical levels of railway asset management to inform plausible design and maintenance strategies that realise the maximum benefit for the available budget.

Using Detailing Concept to Assess Railway Functional Safety

“…The risk assessment of the functional safety [42][43][44][45][46] of any engineering object is associated with the definition of reliability [47][48][49], availability, maintainability, and safety (RAMS) [50,51]. It determines the suitability of objects to perform their functions safely (with defined risk levels at all stages of the life cycle) [25,52,53] and efficiently (with a certain level of costs) under specific operating conditions [54][55][56][57].…”

Consideration of Information Loss in the Transportation Asset Management Process

“…Data quality management is an important topic in TAM ( 4 ). Related to that, the concept of information quality levels (IQLs) was developed by the World Bank, and has been detailed in many literature sources ( 15 – 17 ). The IQLs describe a five-tiered hierarchy to match different levels of data sophistication to the types of decisions supported.…”