Optimal Railway Network Maintenance

英国铁路由20，000英里的轨道和40，000多座桥梁组成。许多基础设施正在老化，为了满足未来对客运和货运的需求，交通密度和负荷将增加。由于财政资源有限，维持这些系统以确保安全可靠的服务是一项重大挑战，需要认真管理。当采用任何维护策略时，计算机模型用于将任何资产（轨道、结构、信号、电气化、通信等）的未来状态与整个寿命成本相关联。要善用现有的财政资源，以维持铁路网的运作，有关的决定必须以整个铁路系统为基础。这些资产之间具有依赖性，例如共同预算，共同拥有时间，共同检查以及利用机会的能力，其中一项资产的条件提供了对另一项资产进行工作的机会。该项目的目标是开发一个优化框架，以在广泛的资产基础上选择最佳的维护和更新策略。通过我们与Network Rail的战略合作伙伴关系，该项目旨在开发一个优化软件，以支持制定“最佳”资产维护策略的决策。

The UK railway comprises of 20,000 miles of track and over 40,000 bridges. Much of the infrastructure is aging and, in order to satisfy the future demand for passenger and freight transport, will experience increased traffic densities and loads. The maintenance of such systems, to ensure a safe and reliable service restricted by limited financial resources, is a significant challenge and needs to be carefully managed. Computer models are used to relate the future state of any asset (track, structures, signalling, electrification, communications etc) to the whole life costs when any maintenance strategy is adopted. To make best use of the financial resources available to maintain the railway network, decisions need to be made on a whole life, whole system basis. The assets feature dependencies between them such as common budgets, common possession time, common inspections and the ability to take advantage of opportunities where the condition of one asset provides the chance to carry out work on another. This produces large scales models and the objective of this project is to develop an optimisation framework to select the best maintenance and renewal strategies across the extensive asset base.Through our Strategic Partnership with Network Rail, this project aims to develop an optimisation software to support the decision making to set the 'best' asset maintenance strategy.