Quiroga, L. M.; Schnieder, E.; Wegele, S.:
Software based railway infrastructure maintenance optimization.
5th Forum of Rail Transport Conference, Bratislava, März 2009.
Abstract Infrastructure maintenance is one of the most expensive processes in railway operation. The optimal utilization of the available human and technical resources subject to a given system availability comprises a very complex analysis. The main reason for this complexity is that railway infrastructure constitutes a multicomponent system, in which subsystems have different types of dependencies: failure, financial, and time dependencies. Furthermore, subsystems may be subject to concurrent ageing processes and shock failures. This work presents a graphical software tool capable of modelling, simulating and showing graphical result representations of railway infrastructure maintenance processes. The tool relies on a Petri net based modelling method, and uses Monte Carlo techniques for simulation. Its main objective is to precisely forecast the impact of alternative maintenance policies on the global infrastructure availability.