scholarly journals Model for Railway Infrastructure Management Organization

1970 ◽  
Vol 24 (2) ◽  
pp. 99-107
Author(s):  
Gordan Stojić ◽  
Slavko Vesković ◽  
Ilija Tanackov ◽  
Sanjin Milinković
Keyword(s):  
Hybrid Model ◽  
Infrastructure Management ◽  
Train Station ◽  
Railway Company ◽  
Railway Systems ◽  
Railway Traffic ◽  
Railway Infrastructure ◽  
Rail Infrastructure ◽  
Management Modes ◽  
Infrastructure Maintenance

The provision of appropriate quality rail services has an important role in terms of railway infrastructure: quality of infrastructure maintenance, regulation of railway traffic, line capacity, speed, safety, train station organization, the allowable lines load and other infrastructure parameters.The analysis of experiences in transforming the railway systems points to the conclusion that there is no unique solution in terms of choice for institutional rail infrastructure management modes, although more than nineteen years have passed from the beginning of the implementation of the Directive 91/440/EEC. Depending on the approach to the process of restructuring the national railway company, adopted regulations and caution in its implementation, the existence or absence of a clearly defined transport strategy, the willingness to liberalize the transport market, there are several different ways for institutional management of railway infrastructure.A hybrid model for selection of modes of institutional rail infrastructure management was developed based on the theory of artificial intelligence, theory of fuzzy sets and theory of multicriteria optimization.KEY WORDSmanagement, railway infrastructure, organizational structure, hybrid model

scholarly journals Railway Vehicle Wheel Flat Detection with Multiple Records Using Spectral Kurtosis Analysis

2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (9) ◽  
pp. 4002
Author(s):  
Araliya Mosleh ◽  
Pedro Aires Montenegro ◽  
Pedro Alves Costa ◽  
Rui Calçada
Keyword(s):  
Detection System ◽  
Railway Vehicle ◽  
Optimal Position ◽  
Maintenance Costs ◽  
Spectral Kurtosis ◽  
Railway Systems ◽  
Railway Infrastructure ◽  
Wheel Flat ◽  
Infrastructure Maintenance ◽  
Envelope Spectrum

The gradual deterioration of train wheels can increase the risk of failure and lead to a higher rate of track deterioration, resulting in less reliable railway systems with higher maintenance costs. Early detection of potential wheel damages allows railway infrastructure managers to control railway operators, leading to lower infrastructure maintenance costs. This study focuses on identifying the type of sensors that can be adopted in a wayside monitoring system for wheel flat detection, as well as their optimal position. The study relies on a 3D numerical simulation of the train-track dynamic response to the presence of wheel flats. The shear and acceleration measurement points were defined in order to examine the sensitivity of the layout schemes not only to the type of sensors (strain gauge and accelerometer) but also to the position where they are installed. By considering the shear and accelerations evaluated in 19 positions of the track as inputs, the wheel flat was identified by the envelope spectrum approach using spectral kurtosis analysis. The influence of the type of sensors and their location on the accuracy of the wheel flat detection system is analyzed. Two types of trains were considered, namely the Alfa Pendular passenger vehicle and a freight wagon.

scholarly journals Classification and Analysis of Elements of Railway Infrastructure Maintenance in Order to Minimize Costs

2020 ◽  
Vol 64 (186) ◽  
pp. 83-89
Author(s):  
Anna Butor ◽  
Krzysztof Labisz ◽  
Michał Batko ◽  
Tomasz Okamer
Keyword(s):  
Atmospheric Conditions ◽  
Railway Traffic ◽  
Repair Technology ◽  
Market Competitiveness ◽  
Railway Infrastructure ◽  
High Workload ◽  
Specialized Equipment ◽  
Infrastructure Maintenance ◽  
A Company ◽  
Very High

Maintaining the railway infrastructure in a condition ensuring safe railway traffic is the basic responsibility of railway infrastructure managers resulting from the Rail Transport Act. Elements of the railway infrastructure are subject to difficult atmospheric conditions as well as changing dynamic loads resulting from the operation of a given part of the infrastructure. The lack of proper maintenance of tracks adversely affects their operation: lowering the permissible speed, reducing driving calm, decreasing the safety of railway traffic, increasing the degradation of aggregate and railway subgrade, as well as increasing the influence of dynamic impacts on the surrounding buildings. The following article presents an analysis of maintenance tasks performed at 5 different locations. For the purposes of the article, data were collected in 2016−2018 on 100 km of track from daily reports performed by qualified supervisors managing maintenance brigades. The aim of the article is to present the results of the collected data, to analyze the most common maintenance tasks, to determine the root causes that result in the need to perform specific tasks and to propose remedies. The aim of the research was to achieve market competitiveness by minimizing costs because today’s performance of duties related to the maintenance of railway infrastructure is characterized by very high costs associated with high workload, repair technology, the need to use specialized equipment, and temporarily exclude a part of the line from traffic. The research was carried out in a company which is a manager of railway infrastructure. Keywords: maintenance, railway infrastructure, railway infrastructure manager, costs

Diagnostics of Track Infrastructure as Part of the Digitisation of Russian Railways

2020 ◽  
Vol 64 (188) ◽  
pp. 149-160
Author(s):  
Janusz Poliński
Keyword(s):  
Diagnostic Tools ◽  
Gradual Transition ◽  
Technical Diagnostics ◽  
Strategic Development ◽  
Railway Infrastructure ◽  
Monitoring And Forecasting ◽  
Infrastructure Maintenance ◽  
Result Analysis ◽  
Railway Maintenance ◽  
Condition Diagnosis

Technical diagnostics is an integral part of the railway maintenance process. Through timely maintenance, in addition to ensuring the safety, functional and technical reliability of the infrastructure, maintenance costs are reduced and downtime losses, due to failures or premature repair requests, are eliminated or reduced. The track infrastructure diagnostic tools have evolved. This is related to, among others, the miniaturisation of instruments, reading accuracy during motion, as well as upgraded measurement automation and result analysis. Currently, data obtained from multifunctional diagnostic tools is the basis for the developed Russian railway infrastructure maintenance and operation digital model. The strategic development of mobile diagnostic labs is the gradual transition to solutions with advanced digital analysis, supported by artificial intelligence, monitoring and forecasting. The article presents the development of mobile labs for the railroad infrastructure condition diagnosis up to the current solutions, in which measurements take place without human intervention and the obtained information is transmitted in real time to the analysis and decision centres. Keywords: rail transport, measuring wagons, digitisation of railways, Russian railways

scholarly journals Decision-Making Process in the Case of Insufficient Rail Capacity

2020 ◽  
Vol 12 (12) ◽  
pp. 5023
Author(s):  
Anna Dolinayova ◽  
Vladislav Zitricky ◽  
Lenka Cerna
Keyword(s):  
Decision Making ◽  
Network Capacity ◽  
Cost Calculation ◽  
Detailed Calculation ◽  
Railway Transport ◽  
Negative Effects ◽  
Railway Network ◽  
Railway Infrastructure ◽  
Rail Infrastructure ◽  
The Impact

One of the main priorities of transport policy in the EU is to take measures to support railway transport as an environmentally friendly transport mode. An interesting challenge for a railway transport operation is represented with cost items for its operation. This problem is exacerbated if transport flows are routed through a congested railway infrastructure. If some or all transport takes place on congested rail infrastructure, the carrier’s costs increase, which may ultimately lead to withdrawal from the market. The article deals with the impact of insufficient capacity on the rail carrier’s costs. We used a pre-cost calculation methodology to calculate the rail carrier’s additional costs due to the insufficient railway network capacity based on detailed calculation of train costs and proposed a methodology for carrier decision-making in case of insufficient rail infrastructure capacity. The case study showed that the use of a diversion track in case of insufficient planned rail line capacity may not be advantageous for carriers, even with a longer waiting time for capacity to be released. One of the ways to eliminate the negative effects of congested railway infrastructure is investment in the increase of its capacity.

scholarly journals COMMON CROSSING CONDITION MONITORING WITH ON BOARD INERTIAL MEASUREMENTS

2019 ◽  
Vol 59 (4) ◽  
pp. 423-434 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mykola Sysyn ◽  
Olga Nabochenko ◽  
Ulf Gerber ◽  
Vitalii Kovalchuk ◽  
Oleksiy Petrenko
Keyword(s):  
Dynamic Response ◽  
Condition Monitoring ◽  
Spectral Feature ◽  
Response Measurement ◽  
Railway Traffic ◽  
Railway Infrastructure ◽  
Vertical Accelerations ◽  
Condition Indicator ◽  
Inertial Measurements ◽  
Common Crossing

A railway turnout is an element of the railway infrastructure that influences the reliability of a railway traffic operation the most. The growing necessity for the reliability and availability in the railway transportation promotes a wide use of condition monitoring systems. These systems are typically based on the measurement of the dynamic response during operation. The inertial dynamic response measurement with on-board systems is the simplest and reliable way of monitoring the railway infrastructure. However, the new possibilities of condition monitoring are faced with new challenges of the measured information utilization. The paper deals with the condition monitoring of the most critical part of turnouts - the common crossing. The application of an on-board inertial measurement system ESAH-F for a crossing condition monitoring is presented and explained. The inertial measurements are characterized with the low correlation of maximal vertical accelerations to the lifetime. The data mining approach is used to recover the latent relations in the measurement’s information. An additional time domain and spectral feature sets are extracted from axle-box acceleration signals. The popular spectral kurtosis features are used additionally to the wavelet ones. The feature monotonicity ranking is carried out to select the most suited features for the condition indicator. The most significant features are fused in a one condition indicator with a principal component analysis. The proposed condition indicator delivers an almost two-time higher correlation to the lifetime as the maximal vertical accelerations. The regression analysis of the indicator to the lifetime with an exponential fit proves its good applicability for the crossing residual useful life prognosis.

Rehabilitation Techniques to Improve Long-Term Performances of Highway-Railway At-Grade Crossings

2011 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jerry G. Rose
Keyword(s):  
Smooth Surface ◽  
Unit Cost ◽  
Complete Removal ◽  
Layered System ◽  
Cooperative Effort ◽  
Railway Line ◽  
Railway Company ◽  
Railway Traffic ◽  
Long Life

The primary purpose of the highway-railway at-grade crossing is to provide a smooth surface for the safe passage of rubber-tired vehicles across the railroad. The crossing support and surface in the jointly used area represent a significantly expensive unit cost of the highway and railway line. The ideal highway crossing will maintain a smooth surface and stable trackbed for a long period of time. This will reduce costly, frequent disruptions to highway and railway traffic (to adjust the track or renew the surface due to rideability concerns), while concurrently providing improved operating performance and long life. Technology is available for rapidly renewing highway crossings within one day using a panel system with specifically designed layered support and premium materials. The procedure involves complete removal of the old crossing panel and trackbed materials — and replacing them with an asphalt underlayment layer, a pre-compacted ballast layer, a new track panel, and a new crossing surface. A cooperative effort between the local highway agency and the railway company will reduce costs, improve the quality of the finished product, and reduce outage of the highway and railroad. A major objective is to minimize disruption to both highway and railway traffic during the renewal process in addition to extending the life of the crossing. Suggested procedures, based on experiences for several installations, are presented. Typical schedules are for the railroad to be to be out-of-service for a maximum of four hours and for the highway to be closed only eight to twelve hours. Results are presented for crossings instrumented with pressure cells to document Pressure levels within the layered portion of the crossing structure. In addition, long-term Settlement measurements and assessments for several crossings are documented. The measurements indicate significantly reduced long-term settlements of crossings incorporating the rapid-renewal, layered system, while maintaining acceptable smoothness levels. These long-term performance evaluations indicate this practice ensures long-life, economical, smooth crossings for improved safety and operating performances for both highway agencies and railway companies.

Construction Contract Quality Warranties: Hybrid Quality Assessment Model

2003 ◽  
Vol 1861 (1) ◽  
pp. 60-70
Author(s):  
Yassir AbdelRazig ◽  
Luh-Maan Chang
Keyword(s):  
Construction Industry ◽  
Hybrid Model ◽  
Subjective Assessment ◽  
External Factors ◽  
Assessment Model ◽  
Steel Bridge ◽  
Quality Inspection ◽  
Infrastructure Management ◽  
Training Stage ◽  
Assessment Techniques

The term "quality" is defined as the conformance to predetermined requirements or specifications. These requirements may be simple or complex. They may be set in terms of the end result required or as a detailed description of how work should be executed. Recently, there has been increasing interest in quality assurance in the construction industry. Most current techniques used in infrastructure assessment and quality inspection rely merely on subjective criteria. Such inaccurate or subjective assessment techniques have been identified as critical obstacles to effective infrastructure management. An overview of contract quality warranties for steel bridge coatings is presented as a practical example, and a hybrid assessment model that can be used to quantitatively measure quality attributes is proposed. The hybrid model combines image processing and neural networks for defect (specifically, rust) recognition and measurement and uses statistical analysis for quality acceptance or rejection on the basis of the contract warranty clauses. The hybrid model incorporates human experience through the training stage to benefit from experts’ knowledge and to correct for other external factors.

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