A Modelling Framework for Railway Infrastructure Reliability Analysis

Abstract

The maintenance and management of railway infrastructure plays a central role in ensuring the reliability and availability of rail transport. In a highly competitive transport market, the rail industry is required to employ new and innovative maintenance strategies that will position rail transport as an affordable and reliable transportation alternative. This can be realised through implementing maintenance strategies that prioritise efficient resource allocation. Application of reliability-based techniques to make informed decisions in maintenance management, with an overall aim of reducing operational expenditure while maintaining safety and efficiency, has been increasing. This paper presents a framework for the application of a reliability-based technique to evaluate the reliability of railway infrastructure systems. OPSOMMINGDie onderhoud en bestuur van spoorweginfrastruktuur speel 'n sentrale rol om die betroubaarheid en beskikbaarheid van spoorverkeer te verseker. In 'n hoogs-mededingende vervoer bedryf, word dit van die spoorindustrie verwag om nuwe en innoverende onderhoudstrategieë toe te pas. Dit sal dié industrie in die posisie stel om 'n bekostigbare en betroubare vervoerkeuse te wees. Hierdie posisie kan egter slegs bereik word indien onderhoudstrategieë toegepas word wat voorkeur gee aan die doeltreffende toewysing van hulpbronne. Daar is 'n toename in die toepassing van tegnieke gegrond op betroubaarheid vir die neem van ingeligte besluite in onderhoudbestuur. Die doel van die tegnieke is om bedryfsuitgawes te verminder terwyl veiligheid en doeltreffendheid behoue bly. In hierdie artikel word 'n raamwerk voorgestel vir die toepassing van tegnieke om betroubaarheid van spoorweginfrastruktuur te evalueer. INTRODUCTIONThe management of railway infrastructure assets involves a range of activities such as building, inspection, maintenance, enhancement, and renewal aimed at optimising the performance, risks, and costs of the infrastructure. This is a highly complex decision-making environment that requires various trade-offs. Furthermore, the relationship between the timing and choice of activities for multiple assets needs to be taken into account to achieve the required performance levels. Significant efforts have been made to develop decision support tools based on cost, risk, and reliability to assist with decision-making in highly complex asset management environments. used reliability-based techniques to develop a parametric model to predict correctly the failure rate probability of point-and-point machines in railway signalling subsystems. Additionally, similar reliability analyses using fault tree analysis have been applied to railway infrastructure systems to quantify the reliability performance of railway electrical subsystems [5]- [7].

Determinants of airport train operational performance

“…Theoretically and based on previous studies, it can be described as follows. Some of the main problems in the management of train journey are schedule adjustment and train rescheduling which have ever been studied by (Jespersen-Groth et al, 2009); train operational performance studied by (Burdett & Kozan, 2014;Espinosa-Aranda & García-Ródenas, 2013;Fourie & Zhuwaki, 2017). Train operational performance, according to (Patra, 2009), is explained through reliability, availability, maintainability, and safety as well as life cycle cost for train infrastructures and shows the model for effective infrastructure maintenance plan.…”

Forming an automated technology to manage freight transportation along a direction

“…The main purpose of work [3] is to achieve high productivity of the railway infrastructure at the lowest cost. Authors propose a multicriteria approach to railway system modeling based on the theory of reliability taking into consideration functional and operational properties of the infrastructure.…”

“…The objective of scientific studies [2][3][4][5][6][7][8][9] is improvement of a certain part of the transportation process. However, there are no sufficient studies on the full cycle of movement of wagon traffic.…”

Integral approach to assessing the criticality of railway infrastructure elements

“…Another specific approach is assessing the importance of a given element (i.e., performance or category) or its importance arising from the possibility of an alternate route or the likelihood of occurrence of an adverse event (Leitner et al, 2017). Another aspect not to be overlooked is identifying critical sites based on reliability analyses (Fourie and Zhuwaki, 2017), analyses of expected accident data (Striegler et al, 2012) or analyses of the vulnerability of interdependent technical infrastructures (Johansson et al, 2011).…”