A Review of the State-of-the-Art in Railway Risk Management

Abstract

With railway in Europe carrying a consistent number of passengers and amount of goods on an aged infrastructure network, the risk related to infrastructure is high. When it is not possible to execute all of the interventions that are desired to offset deterioration, for example, due to budget constraints, the interventions that result in the largest risk reduction for the amount of resources available should be executed, i.e. included in the intervention program to be implemented. To determine the interventions to be executed, it is first necessary to assess the infrastructure related risk and then, second to determine which interventions should be executed. Two tasks that are currently done in the management of railway infrastructure relatively heterogeneously, and mainly at the object level. In this paper, a summary of the state-of-the-art of risk assessment and the development of intervention programs for railway infrastructure is presented. The summary is grouped in overviews of work done on the assessment of risk at both the network and object level, and on the development of intervention programs at both the network and object level. In the conclusion, attention is drawn to the work required to improve both, and steps for future research are given.