Big Data Adoption in Strategic Decision-Making for Railway Infrastructure Asset Management

In this study we investigate Big Data adoption in Asset Management (AM) decision-making at strategic level for Infrastructure Management (IM) in railway. In fact, the formulation of strategies and objectives for the asset portfolio management for IM organisations is a crucial and non-trivial issue, and proper information and data management is required. Several are the studies about Big Data analysis for AM that have been published in the last years, but they mainly aim to develop models and algorithms to support decisions at tactical and operational levels rather than focusing on strategic AM decisions. This paper presents the results of a project funded by the International Union of Railway (UIC) that involved representatives of nine IM organisations in Europe. First, an integrated framework which depicts the different AM strategic decisions of an IM organisation is provided. Then, insights on expected benefits, with focus on data source characteristics and stakeholders’ involvement are presented. Finally, opportunities and challenges of the adoption of Big data to support those decisions are identified. Moreover, recommendations and a roadmap towards Big data-based AM strategic decision-making are presented, which may help to define use cases for future R&D programme