New publication in the Journal Infrastructures
Prof. Dr. Bryan T. Adey's Chair of Infrastructure Management is pleased to announce that the article “Enhancing Railway Track Intervention Planning: Accounting for Component Interactions and Evolving Failure Risks” by Dr. Hamed Mehranfar - former doctoral candidate at the IM group - has been published in the Journal Infrastructures.
In this paper, Dr. Hamed Mehranfar proposes a methodology to leverage digitalisation to efficiently generate an overview of required condition-based railway track interventions, possession windows, and expected costs for railway networks at the beginning of the intervention planning process.
The methodology uses data of different levels of detail, discrete state modelling for uncertain deterioration of components, and component-level intervention strategies. It dynamically updates the condition estimates of components by capturing the interaction between deteriorating components using Bayesian filters. It also estimates the risks associated with different types of potential service losses that may occur due to sudden events using fault trees as a function of time and the condition of components.
An implementation of the methodology is done for a 25 km regional railway network in Switzerland. The results suggest that the methodology has the potential to help track managers early in the intervention planning process. In addition, it is argued that the methodology will lead to improvements in the efficiency of the planning process, improvements in the scheduling of preventive interventions, and the reduction in corrective intervention costs upon the implementation in a digital environment.
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