Abstract
Railway networks are complex systems, and the management of such systems is a challenging task for railway asset managers. It is their responsibility to ensure that the network delivers the highest level of performance for all stakeholders while adhering to strict safety regulations and financial constraints. Historically, reliability, availability, maintainability and safety (RAMS) analysis has been used to assess the performance and safety of railway networks. Nonetheless, there is a lack of consistency in approaches across the industry, with analysis often influenced by the key stakeholders at the time. This research demonstrates an application of an extended RAMS (ExRAMS) framework on the UK railway network. The ExRAMS framework aims to consolidate various extensions to the traditional RAMS approach into a single universal approach, which is beneficial to all stakeholders. This paper explores the data currently available within the rail industry and how these can be used to assess the ten metrics within the framework. The final part of the paper explores how the parameters within the ExRAMS framework can be used as the bases of a value analysis, which can then be used to assist with asset-management decisions.
Highlights
Effective railway transport is key to the social and economic prosperity of the areas it serves, allowing mass, rapid transport of passengers and goods
It can be recognised that the section of the TransPennine Railway Corridor between Huddersfield and Mirfield is one of the most heavily trafficked parts of the railway corridor, with the number of passenger trains per hour alone currently close to the theoretical maximum of 14 trains per hour suggested by the metric
It should be noted that these values include suicides and attempted suicides. It can be seen across the three strategic route sections’ (SRSs) within the TransPennine Railway Corridor that there are a similar number of fatalities and weighted injuries (FWI) each year, varying between 1.7 and 2.2
Summary
Effective railway transport is key to the social and economic prosperity of the areas it serves, allowing mass, rapid transport of passengers and goods. These techniques include whole-life-cycle cost analysis (Fabrycky and Blanchard, 1991; Farr and Faber, 2018; Vandoorne and Gräbe, 2018) and reliability, maintainability and availability analysis (BSI, 2017; Mahboob and Zio, 2018) These traditional approaches often fail to capture all the parameters that are of interest to railway asset managers and by considering cost alone, fail to capture all the stakeholder requirements and do not deliver maximum benefits. Parameters can be assessed at a low level of granularity to distinguish the underlying causes of extreme or erroneous parameter values It allows for the determination of specific sections that are high performing, such that good practice can be replicated across a wider area of the network.
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