Optimal Railway Network Maintenance

英国铁路由2万英里长的铁轨和4万多座桥梁组成。大部分基础设施正在老化，为了满足未来对客运和货运的需求，交通密度和负载将会增加。这些系统的维护是一项重大挑战，需要仔细管理，以确保安全可靠的服务受到有限财政资源的限制。当采用任何维修策略时，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。为了最有效地利用现有的财政资源来维护铁路网，需要在整个生命周期、整个系统的基础上作出决定。资产之间具有相关性，如共同预算、共同占有时间、共同检查以及利用机会的能力，其中一种资产的状况提供了对另一种资产进行工作的机会。这会产生大规模的模型，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，以支持决策制定最佳的资产维护策略。

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.