Link and Effect Model for Maintenance of Railway Infrastructure

Railways are large linear assets of electrical and mechanical systems, and consequently the infrastructure managers (IMs) are extensive with many stakeholder involved. The railway infrastructure and the IMs consist of technical and organisational levels: system, subsystem and component levels, and strategic, tactical and operational levels, respectively. The purpose of this project is to develop a methodology for improving performance measurement systems for railway infrastructure, which integrates both the technical and organisational perspectives, vertically and laterally. It involves several objectives, hundreds of parameters and indicators, data collection, and aggregation of information.The work that has been carried out is as under:• Overall mapping of the operation and maintenance of the Swedish railway infrastructure through interviews and literature review. (Section 4.1)• Railway infrastructure performance indicators have been mapped, structured and compared to European Standards, to act as a reference. About 120 measures were identified and 11 are similar to European Standards maintenance key performance indicators. (Section 4.2 and Appendix A)• A link and effect model has been developed to facilitate improvement of performance measurement systems, by combining performance measurement and engineering principles. It is based on the plan-do-study-act (PDSA) cycle with emphasis on the key components of strategic planning. A case study on the Swedish Iron Ore Line has been carried out to verify the model. (Section 4.3)• An index, or composite indicator, for operation and maintenance of railway infrastructure was developed within the case study, similar to risk matrices and failure mode effect analysis (FMEA). The index is based on infrastructure failures and train delays with equal weighting. (Section 4.3)• Another index has been developed in a continuation of the case study that also includes maintenance times and further weighting. (Section 4.4)• The impact and significance of cold climate on failures in railway infrastructure has been studied in another case study on the Iron Ore Line and the Coast-to-Coast Line in Sweden. (Section 4.5)• A railway RAMS (reliability, availability, maintainability and safety/supportability) analyser software has been developed to demonstrate cost-effective analysis, data presentation and simulation. (Section 4.6 and Appendix B)• As a prestudy, maintenance possession time (maintainability) has been simulated in terms of the actual time to repair as a function of track capacity utilisation, set-up/clearance time and required active repair time. (Section 4.7)Keywords: Railways, train delays, Swedish Iron Ore Line, operation and maintenance, dependability, RAMS, reliability, availability, maintainability, supportability, safetyGodkänd; 2013; 20130902 (chrste)Link and Effect Model for Maintenance of Railway Infrastructur