Railway track availability modelling with opportunistic maintenance practice

Davies, Ben; Andrews, John

Abstract

The geometry of railway track must be maintained within certain standards in order to provide a highly available network, as well as good ride comfort and safety for all rail users. Modelling is well utilised as part of asset management tools in exploring the effectiveness of different rail geometry maintenance strategies. By considering the rail route as an entire system – in contrast to a track section in isolation – a more effective maintenance strategy can be developed, including the deployment of opportunistic maintenance practice. This study presents a Coloured Petri Net model of railway track degradation, inspection, and maintenance planning and delivery, for an entire route of track sections. Opportunistic maintenance is introduced through a novel search transition function, which groups interventions based on local adjacency. Testing explores the availability and maintenance demands expected when following a series of different management strategies. This is extended to testing under heatwave conditions, a known disrupter to track geometry maintenance delivery. Simulation results show that in following an opportunistic strategy, greater availability can be achieved on the modelled rail line. Further, resilience to the heatwave disruptions can be achieved by selecting the correct maintenance strategy parameters. This asset management tool can provide guidance on management strategies for a full route of track sections as a combined system.

• Journal Article Type: Article
• Acceptance Date: Aug 23, 2021
• Online Publication Date: Sep 27, 2021
• Publication Date: 2022-09
• Deposit Date: Nov 19, 2021
• Publicly Available Date: Nov 19, 2021
• Journal: Proceedings of the Institution of Mechanical Engineers, Part F: Journal of Rail and Rapid Transit
• Print ISSN: 0954-4097
• Electronic ISSN: 2041-3017
• Publisher: SAGE Publications
• Peer Reviewed: Peer Reviewed
• Volume: 236
• Issue: 8
• Pages: 907-919
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1177/09544097211047663
• Keywords: Climate change; Coloured Petri net model; Degradation model; Heatwave; Opportunistic maintenance; Railway track degradation; Tamping; Track geometry degradation
• Public URL: https://nottingham-repository.worktribe.com/output/6738577
• Publisher URL: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/09544097211047663
• Additional Information: © 2021 SAGE