Risk-informed sustainable asset management of railway tracks

Abstract

Railway track infrastructure asset management is a challenging problem with added values on safety, society and environment. With railways serving as a key sustainable mode of transportation for passengers and freight, the industry is facing an increasing demand to expand its capacity, availability and speed, resulting in faster deterioration of the ageing railway track infrastructure. Given the constrained maintenance budgets and the environmental challenges posed by climate change, railway asset managers have to identify economically and environmentally justifiable track maintenance strategies without compromising on safety. To this end, this paper proposes a risk-informed approach to arrive at sustainable railway track maintenance strategies while considering the associated track maintenance costs and impacts on train operation (environmental emissions and risk of derailments). Monte Carlo simulation is employed to address data uncertainties associated with track quality data, the costs and benefits of track maintenance and train operation. The proposed approach is successfully applied to the heavy-haul railway lines in Sweden and Australia to compare some alternative maintenance strategies and identify the sustainable one.

Enterprise Asset Management Risks and Management and Control Strategies

“…These risks will have a certain impact on the company's asset value, security, stability, financial status, liquidity, operating efficiency, reputation, etc. [8][9].…”

Risk-informed asset management to tackle scouring on bridges across transport networks

“…This, in turn, would make it possible to manage the level of vulnerability or risks in the system, while considering the costs and benefits of different asset management strategies and resource allocations. Similar approaches have been successfully adopted globally for managing other transport infrastructures such as roads (Qiao, Dawson, Parry, & Flintsch, 2015) and railways (Sasidharan, Burrow, & Ghataora, 2020;Sasidharan & Torbaghan, 2020).…”

“…Risk assessment techniques such as Monte Carlo simulations, Bayesian, Fuzzy logic and Petri nets are recommended to deal with such uncertainties (Rama & Andrews, 2016;Sasidharan & Torbaghan, 2020;Zhang & Wang, 2014). Majority of these techniques use historical data and probability judgements, and conclusions on the acceptability of the solutions are often made directly based on derived probabilities and confidence levels.…”

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].…”