New publication in the journal "Infrastructure Systems" by Dr. Marcel Burkhalter

This publication is the first article from the STABILITY project of Prof. Dr. Bryan T. Adey's Chair of Infrastructure Management.

Abstract

Ensuring that railways provide excellent service requires the execution of maintenance interventions. As railway use intensifies, thisbecomes increasingly difficult due to the conflict between track possession used for train operation and the execution of interventions. One wayto improve the consistency of train schedules, and thus user comfort, is to impose closure-free periods, in which no interventions are planned.The imposition of closure-free periods forces asset managers to group their interventions either before or after the closure-free periods. Thisencourages asset managers to exploit synergies between interventions which can reduce costs and the negative effects on users. However, it alsomeans that maintenance interventions may need to be executed earlier or later than the times suggested when considering only their optimal lifecycles. To deal with this issue, this paper investigated the effect of imposing closure-free periods on the development of intervention programs interms of intervention costs and disruptions to service. We used a network-flow optimization model to determine the optimal interventionprograms for a 5-year planning period without and with the imposition of a minimal 2-year closure-free period on a railway line in Switzerland.The effects of the closure-free period on intervention costs and service were discussed, along with the losses of executing interventions atdifferent points in time from those suggested using optimal asset life cycles

external page Read article