A petri net methodology for modelling the maintenance of railway route sections

Litherland, Jack; Andrews, John

Abstract

Railway utilization is increasing. In 2017-18 there were over 1.7 billion passenger journeys made on the UK railway network, more than double the number made in 1995. Therefore getting maximum performance from the existing network by streamlining maintenance is vital. Previous research has tended to model maintenance interventions as uniform length and assume no spatial dependencies. However, in reality maintenance decisions are generally taken accounting for the condition of the whole of a route section thus prioritizing the utilization of the available resources. In this research, Petri nets will be used to explore a range of techniques for modelling maintenance on a 100 mile section of UK railway. Four methodologies will be implemented and compared. Initially the system will be modelled using a single small (220 yards) section and the values for the route section extrapolated from this. The second method will model the system as 849 individual small sections, with some interactions and dependencies considered between the track sections. The third methodology will consider that maintenance will affect a group of adjacent sections and maintenance will only be performed if all sections are degraded. The final methodology will schedule work using work banks to allow the number of sections maintained during an intervention to vary.

Citation

Litherland, J., & Andrews, J. (2019). A petri net methodology for modelling the maintenance of railway route sections. In M. Beer, & E. Zio (Eds.), Proceedings of the 29th European Safety and Reliability Conference (ESREL 2019), 452-460. https://doi.org/10.3850/978-981-11-2724-3_+0137-cd

• Conference Name: 29th European Safety and Reliability Conference (ESREL 2019)
• Start Date: Sep 22, 2019
• End Date: Sep 26, 2019
• Acceptance Date: Apr 18, 2019
• Publication Date: Sep 25, 2019
• Deposit Date: Jun 21, 2019
• Publicly Available Date: Jun 21, 2019
• Pages: 452-460
• Book Title: Proceedings of the 29th European Safety and Reliability Conference (ESREL 2019)
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.3850/978-981-11-2724-3_+0137-cd
• Keywords: Maintenance, Petri net, Railway, Stoneblowing, Tamping
• Public URL: https://nottingham-repository.worktribe.com/output/2216468
• Publisher URL: http://itekcmsonline.com/rps2prod/esrel2019/e-proceedings/html/0137.xml
• Related Public URLs: https://esrel2019.org/#/