Allocation of effective maintenance limit for railway track geometry

The objective of this study has been to develop an approach to the allocation of an effective maintenancelimit for track geometry maintenance that leads to a minimisation of the total annual maintenancecost. A cost model was developed by considering the cost associated with inspection, preventivemaintenance, normal corrective maintenance and emergency corrective maintenance. The standarddeviation and extreme values of isolated defects of the longitudinal level were used as quality indicatorsfor preventive and corrective maintenance activities. The Monte Carlo technique was used tosimulate the track geometry behaviour under different maintenance limit scenarios and the effectivelimit was determined which minimises the total maintenance cost. The applicability of the model wastested in a case study on the Main Western Line in Sweden. Finally, a sensitivity analysis was carriedout on the inspection intervals, the emergency corrective maintenance cost and the maintenanceresponse time. The results show that there is an optimal region for selecting an effective limit.However, by considering the safety aspects in track geometry maintenance planning, it is suggestedthat the lower bound of the optimal region should be selected.Validerad;2019;Nivå 2;2019-12-06 (johcin)