Quality of construction materials as an indicator of the design of railway transport facilities in Russia

Abstract

The purpose of the research is to assess the global quality of project design documentation for capital construction at the preliminary stage of investment projects in the context of the properties and qualities of applied construction materials. The problem of the assessment of the quality of construction and finishing materials in the subdivisions of Russian Railways, the largest Russian company, raises fundamental issues of regulatory and methodological support during the choice of engineering solutions and reasonability grounds of investments in the construction and reconstruction of transport infrastructure facilities. According to the formal indicators for the assessment of the properties of materials in the company, the authors used a method based on a separate analysis of the regulatory and methodological support of the construction preparation process. The main quality criterion was adopted in the form of deviations in documentation by the internal examination service of the company projects due to the unreliability in the determination of the physical properties of material resources. The main tool to influence the design process is the formalization of requirements for accounting construction materials, especially innovative ones, in project design documentation. These requirements are reflected in the proposed methodology for the generation of documentation at the early stages of investment project. A retrospective analysis of the verification results of infrastructure projects in the company showed that after the introduction of uniform requirements for the applied materials and the introduction of the basic provisions of materials science in the methodological documents, a positive trend has occurred during internal verification. The decrease in the number of incorrectly determined values of the need for construction materials indicate that cost certification has become more explicit and accessible to developers. It is proved that the tool for the management of the quality of construction materials by specifying the structure of documents justifying the main design decisions is the most effective. The idea is confirmed that the greatest responsibility for the efficiency of the applied material resources falls on the early stages of project development. The efforts made by the Company in this direction lead to positive changes.