Development of an Extended RAMS Framework for Railway Networks

Abstract

Railway asset managers have finite resources which requires them to make strategic decisions on where, when and how the available budget will be spent on the railway, while ensuring safety limits are maintained and a high level of performance is delivered for customers. The purpose of this research is to develop a suitable framework, which can be used by railway asset managers, to quantify asset performance in a way that enables comparisons between different parts of the railway and enables the asset manager to make key decisions on how the railway can be improved. A frequently used assessment tool is RAMS (Reliability, Availability, Maintainability and Safety) analysis. In recent years RAMS analysis has been extended to include additional parameters such as: security, health, environment, economics and politics (SHEeP). This research proposes an extended RAMS framework, which considers 12 parameters in a four level hierarchy, specifically for use on railway networks by railway asset managers.

An Alternative Approach to Railway RAMS: Development of an Extended RAMS Framework

“…Another example of an ExRAMS analysis for infrastructure asset managers is given by Rijkswaterstaat (2012) as reliability, availability, maintainability, safety, security, environment, economics, health and politics (Ramssheep). Various studies have evaluated the effectiveness of the Ramssheep approach as well as commented on the ability to quantify values for each of the indicators (Litherland et al, 2019;Wagner, 2012;Wagner and Van Gelder, 2013). An alternative structure was proposed by Karim et al (2015), named Ram4S (reliability, availability, maintainability, safety, security, sustainability and supportability).…”

“…The ExRAMS framework contains ten parameters based on the parameters defined by Litherland et al (2019). The ten parameters were organised in a four-level hierarchy, as shown in Figure 1.…”