Abstract
The assessment and analysis of railway infrastructure capacity is an essential task in railway infrastructure management carried out to meet the required quality and capacity demand of railway transport. For sustainable and dependable infrastructure management, it is important to assess railway capacity limitation from the point of view of infrastructure performance. However, the existence of numerous performance indicators often leads to diffused information that is not in a format suitable to support decision making. In this paper, we demonstrated the use of fuzzy inference system for aggregating selected railway infrastructure performance indicators to relate maintenance function to capacity situation. The selected indicators consider the safety, comfort, punctuality and reliability aspects of railway infrastructure performance. The resulting composite indicator gives a reliable quantification of the health condition or integrity of railway lines. A case study of the assessment of overall infrastructure performance which is an indication of capacity limitation is presented using indicator data between 2010 and 2012 for five lines on the network of Trafikverket (Swedish Transport Administration). The results are presented using customised performance dashboard for enhanced visualisation, quick understanding and relevant comparison of infrastructure conditions for strategic management. This gives additional information on capacity status and limitation from maintenance management perspective.
Highlights
An essential task in railway infrastructure management is the evaluation of the network capacity
We demonstrated the use of fuzzy inference system for aggregating selected railway infrastructure performance indicators to relate maintenance function to capacity situation
It is worth mentioning that the infrastructure manager does not have targets for the fuzzy composite indicator (FCI) for the different lines class yet; the level colouration in the performance dashboard is only used for demonstrating possibilities presented by this approach
Summary
An essential task in railway infrastructure management is the evaluation of the network capacity. An issue that is addressed in this study is the extension of capacity analysis to quantification of health condition of railway infrastructure under certain traffic profile Such integrity indicator or measure of infrastructure performance gives an additional measure of capacity limitation on a line. Using infrastructure performance indicators in capacity analysis help to relate maintenance and renewal functions to the capacity condition of a network and facilitate effective maintenance decision making. Such indicators should be aggregated to present the condition or integrity of infrastructure in a holistic way such that it can be related to the capacity condition of the infrastructure To this end, railway infrastructure performance indicators and the process of aggregating them as a composite indicator are studied in this paper. The contribution of this paper is the development of composite performance indicator for infrastructure management, useful for relating maintenance functions to the capacity condition of a network and facilitating effective maintenance decision making. The final section presents the concluding remark of this paper
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